Kenai residents will vote on a ballot proposition this October which aims to amend borough code to require that all ballots “cast in person on paper ballots on election day shall be hand counted only, counting shall occur upon closing of the polls on election day at recognized local voting precincts and and ballots shall be counted by registered Kenai voters.”
“With a lot of time and energy expended from numerous volunteers and with the support of 1,530 registered Kenai Peninsula Voters, we accomplished the mission of getting KPB Initiative Petition 2024-01 onto the October 7, 2025 Kenai Peninsula Borough Election Ballot,” petition leader Duane Edelman announced on Feb. 3. “I’m thankful for the community’s support for this process and look forward to continuing our efforts working on ‘Election Integrity. My deepest thanks to those that helped accomplish this effort.”
The grassroots petition effort took a step forward last week when Edelman’s team turned in an additional 400 signatures to the borough clerk’s office.
As reported earlier by the Watchman, hand-count advocates had until 5 p.m. on Jan. 30 to turn in an additional 190 signatures for their ballot petition. They successfully submitted more than enough to put the question to voters in October.
Earlier this month, Edelman, was notified by the borough clerk that his initiative petition failed to secure the needed signatures. Edelman’s team turned in 1,125 signatures on Jan. 9, and needed 954 for approval. However, only 764 names were verified by the clerk’s office. The others were rejected for various reasons.
Per borough code, petitioners then had 10 days to make up the lost signatures.
On Jan. 30, Edelman posted an update to hand-count allies.
ALASKA WATCHMAN DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX
“Thanks to the efforts of Patriots collecting signatures & Patriots signing our Supplemental Initiative Petition booklets, we needed 190 signatures & we turned in 403 signatures,” he noted.
While Edelman expected that some of the newly-submitted signatures would be tossed due to technical errors, he was confident that his group turned in more than enough names.
The push to require hand-counting of Kenai Borough ballots began in 2021, shortly after President Trump lost his bid for the White House. At the time, Edelman and others criticized the borough’s practice of using Dominion machine ballot counters – a concern that was echoed across much of the nation by Trump and many conservatives who raised questions about election security issues and ballot tally irregularities.
Hand-count advocates in Kenai are attempting to implement a system similar to the Mat-Su Borough’s new system, which requires that borough ballots be entirely hand counted.
Edelman said he was forced to resort to a citizen ballot initiative after failing to convince the borough assembly to act.
5 Comments
Good deal! Prayers that Kenai can remove all machines and have hand counting only!
Might be interesting to find out how many of the names “rejected for various reasons” were actually registered to vote and/or voted in the last election.
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What say you, Mr. Edelman?
I can’t speak for Kenai’s signature collection process. I do remember when we were collecting signatures for repealing ranked choice voting, there were several different reasons that signatures did not get counted. I know, personally, I had several in my book where I did not get their complete address, so some of mine did not count.
Good for Kenai PB. At least that region & MSB can have confidence in the ballots counted aspect of voting. The ballots cast aspect can only be assured, if and only if, The State stops auto-registering at PFD application AND cleans up the 113% dirty filthy bloated voter rolls. Which the state shares with NGO’s. Can you say “USAID money laundering to the Dem apparatchik”?
Ridiculous. Hand counting takes far too long.