JUNEAU, Alaska | The tiny Alaska Native village of Beaver is about 40 minutes — by plane — from the nearest city. Its roughly 50 residents rely on weekday flights for mail and many of their basic supplies, from groceries to Amazon deliveries of everyday household items.
Air service plays an outsize role in the nation’s most expansive state, where most communities rely on flights for year-round access. Planes also play a critical role in elections, getting voting materials and ballots to and from rural precincts such as Beaver and in delivering ballots for thousands of Alaskans who vote by mail — some in places where in-person voting is not available.
The vast distances and relative isolation of so many communities make Alaska unique and are why its residents have a significant interest in arguments taking place Monday before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Many here worry that a case from Mississippi challenging whether ballots received after Election Day can be counted in federal elections could end Alaska’s practice of accepting late-arriving ballots. Alaska counts ballots if they are postmarked by Election Day and received within 10 days, or 15 days for overseas voters in general elections.
“These processes have been in place for a long time just to ensure that our ballots are counted,” said Rhonda Pitka, a poll worker and first chief in Beaver, which sits along the Yukon River 110 miles north of Fairbanks.
If the court decides ballots in all states must be received by Election Day, Ms. Pitka said, “They’ll be disenfranchising thousands of people — thousands of people in these rural communities. It’s just basically saying that their votes don’t count, and that’s a real shame.”
Alaska is one of 14 states that allow all mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive days or weeks later and be counted, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Voting Rights Lab. An additional 15 provide grace periods for military and overseas ballots.
But Alaska’s geography, weather and great distances between communities — Alaska is more than twice the size of Texas, the nation’s second-largest state — raise the stakes for voters. The unusual way the state counts its votes also makes a grace period important, advocates say.
Under Alaska’s ranked-choice system for general elections, workers in small rural precincts call in voters’ first choices to a regional election office. All ballots, however, ultimately are flown to the state Division of Elections in the capital, Juneau. There, the races not won outright are tabulated to determine a winner.
Even with Alaska’s current 10-day grace period, ballots from some villages in 2022 were not fully counted because of mail delays. They arrived too late for tabulations in Juneau, 15 days after Election Day.
If the Supreme Court rules that ballots cannot be counted if they arrive at election offices after Election Day, scores of Alaska voters could be affected. About 50,000 Alaskans voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election.
“I think there’s probably no other state where this ruling could have a more detrimental impact than ours,” Alaska’s senior U.S. senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski, said in an interview.
Ms. Murkowski sees the case — a challenge by the Republican National Committee and others to Mississippi’s allowance of late-arriving ballots — as an effort to end voting by mail nationwide.
A court filing in the Mississippi case by Alaska Attorney General Stephen Cox and Solicitor General Jenna Lorence did not take sides but outlined geographic and logistical challenges to holding elections in Alaska.
In Atqasuk, on Alaska’s North Slope, poll workers counted votes on election night in 2024, tallies they would normally relay by phone to election division officials.
But the filing said they could not get through and “chose what they saw as the next best solution — they placed the ballots and tally sheets into a secure package and mailed them to the Division, who did not receive them until nine days later.”
The filing seeks clarity from the Supreme Court, particularly around what it means for ballots to be received by Election Day.
While it is clear when a ballot is cast, “when certain ballots are actually ‘received’ is open to different interpretations, especially given the connectivity challenges for Alaska’s far-flung boroughs,” Mr. Cox and Ms. Lorence wrote.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.