No Northwest Arctic Borough document names a candidate or seat for the Oct. 6 election

Voters in the Northwest Arctic Borough cannot learn from any borough publication which assembly seats are on the Oct. 6 ballot or who is running. The borough's 11 communities have no roads between them. Outside Kotzebue, voting means an absentee ballot by mail. The only in-person early voting site is the borough office in Kotzebue.

Nominating petitions closed Aug. 22, 45 days before the election, under borough code 4.08.020. Each petition required the signatures of 25 qualified voters.

The borough has published one election document since: an absentee-voting notice posted Sept. 8, signed by Borough Clerk Stella Atoruk, who administers the election with Deputy Clerk Johnson Greene. It names no candidate and no seat.

Borough code 4.04.100 requires seven things in an election notice: the date, the offices or propositions, poll opening and closing times, precinct polling locations, a boundary description of the precincts, the procedure for declaring candidacy, and whether the election is general or special. The posted notice carries the date and none of the other six. Code 4.04.090 requires at least 30 days' notice, which for Oct. 6 fell on Sept. 6, two days before the notice went up.

The code does not require any of this online. Notice goes up in two or more conspicuous places in each precinct and by newspaper or radio, with pre-recorded Inupiaq announcements distributed to borough stations. None of that can be checked remotely, and nothing establishes the borough failed to do it.

Early in-person absentee voting runs weekdays, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Sept. 21 through Oct. 5. Mail applications must be received by Oct. 2. "There is nothing that limits the Borough Clerk in personally delivering a ballot to a person who is unable to make application in person at the Clerk's office for an absentee voter's ballot," the notice says. It prints the opening of the mail window as Sept. 16, 2025. Every other date in the document is 2026.

The assembly has 11 seats. Kotzebue holds five, ten villages share six, and Ambler, Kobuk and Shungnak share Seat D. President Craig McConnell holds Seat H. The borough noted a Seat C vacancy May 5 and filled it by appointment in July. The Aug. 25 regular meeting agenda, three days after filing closed, carried no certification of candidates and no ballot approval. Which seats are on the ballot, and whether any proposition joins them, is not established by any record reachable from outside the borough. The next regular meeting is Sept. 21, the day early voting opens.