Hundreds of duplicate ballots for the Juneau municipal election have been mailed to the same individuals due to what the borough calls a “technical glitch.”

“CBJ Elections is aware of a technical glitch that occurred with approximately 1% of ballots mailed from our printers,” a Sept. 18 alert from the borough noted. “Some people who voted a questioned ballot in the State Primary Election or updated their voter registration between 8/23/24 and 9/1/24 may receive two ballots in the mail. Those people should vote one ballot and destroy the other.”

Legally, voters are only permitted to cast one ballot, but now there are hundreds of duplicates circulating throughout the Juneau Borough. With roughly 27,800 registered voters, that works out to roughly 278 extra ballots floating around. That’s more than enough to impact local elections in which less than 9,500 voters typically participate.

The borough claims it has “protocols” in place to ensure each voter only casts a single ballot, but critics of mail-in balloting point out that it is the most easily manipulated system, especially when every registered voter is automatically sent a ballot mail-in ballot, whether they asked for one or not.

Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has tracked mail-in voting problems for years, states that it is the “worst way to run an election.”

In order to hold secure mail-in elections, PILF notes that governments need “highly accurate” voter rolls, something which Alaska has failed to attain for decades.

“Otherwise, ballots end up at the wrong addresses and some people are even sent multiple ballots under slightly different versions of their name,” PILF warns. “Voting in person is the most secure way to run an election and gives voters an opportunity to correct errors on their ballots.”

If local governments do adopt mail-in voting, PILF recommends that voters be required to individually request ballots before they are mailed out. Automatically mailing ballots to every registered voter – which is what Juneau does – is “not a secure way to run an election, PILF cautions.

Juneau claims it “knows how this glitch occurred and has taken steps to ensure it does not happen in future elections.”

In what many find disconcerting, however, Juneau mail-in voters no longer need a witness verification signature when casting local ballots in the Oct.1 municipal election.

“A witness signature is not required to vote in CBJ municipal elections,” the clerk’s office stated one day after announcing that it had sent out duplicate ballots. “Voters only need to provide their own signature and a personal identifier.”

While witness verification for mail-in ballots was required in the past to ensure the legal identity of absentee voters, the Juneau Assembly did away with these safeguards back in 2021. Now voters only need to provide one “personal identifier,” in addition to their signature. These identifiers can be any one of the following: voter registration number, the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, the voter’s date of birth, or the voter’s Alaska driver’s license number.

Click here to support Alaska Watchman reporting.