Juneau’s official tax bill notice has inadvertently raised questions about the city’s heavy reliance on the U.S. Postal Service to facilitate its mail-in-only ballot system.
A strange phrase appears across the top of the property tax bills that were recently sent to Juneau residents: “Stop playing USPS roulette and pay your CBJ Property Tax bill online!”
The warning spurred prominent local resident Angela Rodell to pen a column that recently ran in the Juneau Independent. Rodell notes that the tax-bill warning suggests the city “no longer trusts the mail to reliably get a check from a resident’s kitchen table to City Hall in time. It wants people to skip the postal system entirely.”
In a June 26 notice, the City and Borough of Juneau told property owners to expect their mailed 2026 annual property tax bills soon, but it added that those who don’t get a tax bill in the mail should contact local officials to find out what happened.
Rodell’s column questions why the city is confident when it comes to mail-in ballots, but leery when dealing with mail-in tax bills.
“[W]hen it comes to the single most important thing a local government asks its residents to do — vote — CBJ’s answer is the opposite,” she writes. “Voting here isn’t just mail-optional. It’s mail-only, mail-by-default, mail-as-the-whole-system.”
This begs a serious question for the former CEO of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp and past Commissioner of the Alaska Dept. of Revenue.
“The city that warns you not to gamble on the post office for a tax payment asks you to trust that same post office with your ballot,” Rodell continues, adding that Juneau’s vote-by-mail system might deserve a second look.
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In May of 2020, Juneau adopted a mail-in-only vote system for its municipal election, a move that drew some criticism because of the known fraudulent abuses and technical challenges associated with widespread mail-in voting. This includes sending multiple ballots to the same address, as occurred in 2024, residents not receiving their ballots in the mail, and difficulties ensuring the ballots are actually being filled out by the correct people.
As Rodell points out, the elections department prints more than 28,000 local ballots in Everett, Washington, before mailing them to individual voters’ homes in Alaska. Last year, just 10,263 of those ballots were returned, while nearly 18,000 were lost or thrown out.
In addition to the local government’s heavy reliance on the postal system, Juneau residents pay a heavy price for doing away with traditional in-person voting.
“Ongoing costs were expected to run roughly $200,000 more per year than a conventional election on top of nearly $1 million spent to launch the system in 2020,” Rodell observed.
