Did Alaska Really Deliver Presidential Votes By Dogsleds?
INDIGENOUS, POLICY
Writer: Mia Bennett, Cryopolitics
Photographs: Mia Bennett, Kristjan Fridriksson, Richard Brahm (US Coast Guard), Aliec B. Donahue Library & Archives, Browne Belmore (Library of Congress), Anchorage Museum.
January 2021
In the days and weeks after the November USA Presidential 2020 election - which now feels like a century ago - Alaska was lampooned for taking eons to count its votes. On NBC news talk show Meet the Press, prior to the election, political analyst Jessica Taylor suggested that it could take a while for the results of Alaska’s race for US Senator to be known. She quipped: “This is a race that we, I think, don’t know on election night because literally they have to bring in some of the ballots by dog sled.”
Alaska’s Division of Elections quickly retorted on Twitter: “We do not bring in ballots by dog sled.”
They could have added an “anymore” to that sentence, as Mia Bennett outlines in her article on how voting in the USA’s northernmost state represents the diverse challenges faced by Arctic communities - and the role of the dogsled in that story.
As Alaska goes, so goes the nation
There was a time in Alaskan history back when the state was still a territory that it held elections in October. Although residents of the territory could not vote for president, the rest of the country eagerly anticipated the results from its statewide and local elections, which were believed to forecast how things would turn out in the rest of the Lower 48 one month later. A New York Times article from 1952 suggested, “As Alaska goes, so goes the nation.”
Nowadays, the State of Alaska is one of the last to report its results. In this year’s nail-biter of an election, the Last Frontier’s tardiness led it to become the butt of many jokes and memes. But there are a number of reasons – some legitimate and others contestable – for why Alaska’s Division of Elections takes so long to count the ballots of the state’s over half a million registered voters.
Generous absentee voting deadlines
The first reason for the state’s slow tally is the state’s generous deadlines, which allow ballots to arrive from voters both within the state and the rest of the U.S. up to 10 days after the election, and up to 15 days if those voters reside overseas. Since last year’s election was held on November 3rd, the last ballots to arrive weren’t counted until November 18th.
Plus, as in the rest of the country, the pandemic led more people to vote early than ever before. In view of the virus’ spread, the Alaska Supreme Court also waived the need for voters to have their ballot witnessed. As a result of the big switch to absentee voting, hundreds of thousands of votes needed to be transported across the state, often by airplane - not, contrary to popular belief, by dog sled. Alaska also didn’t start counting absentee ballots until a week after the election, later than every other state.
These stickers, designed by Alaskan artist Barbara Lavallee to showcase the diversity, strength, and power of Alaskan women were available to early 2020 voters in Yup’ik, Northern Inupiaq, and Aleut.
More registered voters than residents
Alaska’s Division of Elections says the week-long delay to the start of counting was due to a need to verify that every vote cast was legitimate and nobody voted twice. Although doing so is a crime, given the state’s lack of roads and overall infrastructure, one could imagine a situation in which a person might have thought to try sending their ballot by mail but then also decided to vote in person when they realized that, say, the weather would actually allow them to make it to the polling booth for once.
Voter verification is also tricky in Alaska because it’s one of a dozen or so states with more registered voters than residents. In 2018, there were 569,903 registered active voters even though the state only had 548,373 residents aged 18 or older. This doesn’t necessarily indicate fraud, for many residents could have simply moved out of state, but it does underscore the need for the state to cross-check all submitted ballots.
Yet this late start to counting, is where some, such as the Anchorage Daily News’ editorial board, criticize Alaska’s process. With absentee ballots having started to arrive in October, the newspaper argued that the verification process could have started earlier than seven days before the election, when things actually commenced.
But none of these reasons is the real reason for the delays in Alaska. That comes down to something that is a hindrance on various other levels than ballot counting alone - infrastructure. Or rather the lack of it.
The biggest reason for Alaska’s slow counting – and the reason for its generous mail-in deadlines to begin with – is the lack of sufficient infrastructure to enable the timely delivery of completed ballots to a central location. Dozens of Alaska’s rural villages lack roads and daily flight service. While this isolation has spared many of them during the coronavirus pandemic, the flip side is that it takes a long time to get anything in or out, whether voting machines or absentee ballots.
In-person voting in rural Alaska is no small feat
In rural villages and towns, many voters choose to cast their vote in person. Voting by mail is not always feasible. They might not have a regular address at which to receive a ballot, or they might need assistance in a Native language. While a few larger hubs like Utqiagvik have modern optical scan machines, 135 mostly small and remote villages are “hand-count precincts” where votes are tabulated by – you guessed it – hand. These precincts accounted for about 5% of Alaska’s votes in 2008. About three weeks before election day, ballots, pens, and in 2020, hand sanitizer and wipes, are sent out to each precinct. The Division of Elections then calls each location about 10 days before election day, ensuring to everything has arrived.
On election day, places like community centers, bingo halls, and tribal offices allow registered voters to come in and complete a ballot. Some offer free food like hamburgers, hotdogs, and chips. But things don’t always go smoothly. Inclement weather can prevent people from getting to the polls on time, especially in November, when autumn quickly turns to winter.
Some precincts go quite literally an extra mile to ensure they reach all eligible voters. In 2004, Kasigluk, a village separated by a river in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, had a ballot machine (as opposed to just hand-counting ballots). A 2004 series on voting in rural Alaska by local NBC affiliate KTUU documented the following turn of events on election day:
“The local election officer makes an announcement through a borrowed marine radio that anyone who wants to vote has to come down to the community center by 11:30 A.M. because that is when the officer is taking the single polling machine to the other side of the river. At 11:30, the local election official collects the materials, packs up the ballot machine and drives it by four-wheeler down to the river.
The old village site, where some tribe members still reside, is on the other side of the river but there is no bridge, so the election officer loads the ballot machine and materials onto a boat and crosses over. When the weather is bad, this is no mean feat.
The ballot machine is set up again at the school on the other side where the children recite the pledge of allegiance in Yup’ik. The principal makes an announcement on the radio that the ballot machine has arrived and the poll in Kasigluk is open. The DOE says there are about 150 communities like this one.”
(SOURCE:LANDRETH AND SMITH (2007) PP. 82-83.)
In typical hand-count precincts, after all the votes are received, the ballots are tallied, with the results entered into a prepared tally book and then called into the regional office. These results then get put into a computer and uploaded via modem connection into the Alaska Director’s Office.
Six years later in 2020, many Native Americans and Alaska Natives still had to travel long distances to reach their polling places.
They also had to contend with tactics designed by the Trump administration, such as more stringent voter identification laws, that make it harder for Native Americans to vote. Scenes of Navajo Nation members in New Mexico on horseback (whose votes may have been crucial to turning the state blue) were lauded as heroic.
But why should the country’s Indigenous Peoples need to make such an effort to enjoy a right so basic and a duty expected of all American citizens over the ageof 18: to vote?
The post office in Kaktovik, Alaska where voters could mail absentee ballots. JONAA©Mia Bennett
In the 70s, some Alaskan votes were reported after inauguration
If you thought two weeks was a long time to wait for official election results, think again. In the 1972 federal election between Richard Nixon, the incumbent, and Democratic challenger George McGovern, it took nearly three months for the final results to emerge from one of Alaska’s most remote communities.
That year, a special plane had to air-drop ballots (as there was no ice runway yet) to the 37 registered voters on Little Diomede Island – America’s closest spit of land to Russia, just two miles away. The official returns would not be able to be sent until the Bering Sea froze over, potentially after Nixon was re-inaugurated on January 20, 1973. In the meantime, a phone call to Nome could be made to unofficially report the results.
The village on Little Diomede Island. In 1972, it took three months to officially report the votes from the presidential election between Nixon and McGovern. Photo: US Coast Guard Petty Officer Richard Brahm (public domain).
Even in 2020, however, telephone lines to Diomede can prove unreliable. This year during the Alaskan primaries in August, phone problems prevented the island’s poll workers from reaching the Division of Elections on the night of election day and into the next day.
Diomede, in fact, only got hooked up with telephones in 1988. In an incredible example of two worlds colliding, when the phone system was introduced, given the island’s nearly cashless economy, some of the town’s Iñupiat residents reportedly expected “to pay their phone bills by barter–trading walrus ivory carvings to Bob Blodgett, Mukluk Telephone Co. president, as payment.”
Election material in 8 Alaska Native languages and dialects
Alaska’s ability to carry out an election in the face of incredible logistical difficulties is impressive. Credit is due not just to the state, but to local poll workers, too. But the state hasn’t always supported Alaska Native voting. While in 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act made all Native Americans citizens, thereby granting them the right to vote, immediately after in 1925, the Alaska State Legislature immediately the Voters Literacy Act requiring voters to speak and read English.
Even once this discriminator law was finally overruled by the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965, which banned literacy tests and other exclusionary procedures, several of Alaska’s elected officials did little to ensure that Alaska Natives could practice their right to vote. The late senator Ted Stevens, for instance, pushed against making election materials available in Alaska Native languages.
Since then, Alaska Natives’ voting access has improved. The state now provides election materials in eight Alaska Native languages and dialects, while oral assistance, usually through recordings, is offered for “historically unwritten languages.” (The state has at least 20 Native languages.)
The sample ballot in Northern Inupiaq for the 2020 federal election. The translation is not complete, though, for as Ballot Measure No. 1 on changing oil and gas production tax on the North Slope is still written in English.
Yet rural and Native votes might still be suppressed by virtue of living off the grid. To overcome this problem, in 2014, then-attorney general Eric Holder, a civil rights activist, announced a plan to improve voting access for Native Americans and Alaska Natives. He remarked of the long distances many Native Americans have to travel to reach the polls:
“These conditions are not only unacceptable, they’re outrageous…As a nation, we cannot — and we will not — simply stand by as the voices of Native Americans are shut out of the democratic process.”
Six years later in 2020, many Native Americans and Alaska Natives still had to travel long distances to reach their polling places. They also had to contend with tactics designed by the Trump administration, such as more stringent voter identification laws, that make it harder for Native Americans to vote. Scenes of Navajo Nation members in New Mexico on horseback (whose votes may have been crucial to turning the state blue) were lauded as heroic. But why should the country’s Indigenous Peoples need to make such an effort to enjoy a right so basic and a duty expected of all American citizens over age 18: vote?
Mail carriers and their dogs with loaded sleds in front of the Imperial Bank in Athabasca, Alberta, Canada, preparing to depart for Calling River, in 1915. Source: Alice B. Donahue Library and Archives, Athabasca University.
Dogsleds have carried deciding votes
But back to the comment from Meet The Press referred to in the intro of this article. As stated by the Alaska Division no Alaskan vote was transported by dogsled in 2020 - but in previous decades, dogsleds were actually integral to delivering mail and goods to iced-in communities across Canada and Alaska. In the late nineteenth century, as gold miners poured into the northern interior and railways, roads, and telegraphs were built, demand for regular and reliable mail delivery grew. Dog teams formed an important part of the postal service’s infrastructure in the two countries’ northern territories, as William Schneider documents in his history of Alaskan dog team mail carriers.
Even in northern states in the Lower 48 like Montana and Minnesota, before climate change began warming up the prairies, dog teams delivered mail in winter over frozen rivers. John Lancaster describes of nineteenth-century Minnesota: “When the churning, frigid waters of winter no longer allowed for mail by sail, mail carriers resorted to packsack, dogsled and snowshoe.”
In 1921, dog sleds in the Yukon did in fact carry the deciding votes. The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), December 12, 1921.
Dog sleds did not only carry ballots: they even carried candidates as they campaigned across the north. In November 1921, the campaign for Yukon’s sole seat in Canada’s parliament was “being run with dog sleds over the trackless white wastes of the frozen North,” according to a newspaper from the time.
Liberal candidate Frederick Tennyson Congdon traveled from British Columbia up to Yukon’s capital, Whitehorse, to begin racing around the territory on a dedicated dog team on journey that was far more grueling and riskier than the whistle-stop airplane tours candidates make today. Both candidates expected to “cover hundreds of miles by sleds before the election on December 6.”
Fierce weather further complicated the running of elections in Canada in late autumn in the early 1900s. After the votes were cast in the 1921 race, storms knocked out telegraph lines across the Yukon. Alaska’s Division of Elections may jest today on Twitter, but a hundred years ago in a parliamentary race across the border in Canada, dog sleds did in fact carry the deciding votes
The New York Times report on the elections held on Alaska’s Little Diomede Islands in the Bering Strait on November 8th 1972.
Dog sled teams resting on the Alaska Range’s south side on their way to a lumber camp. Photo: Browne Belmore (ca. 1900-1930), Library of Congress.
Alaska’s last sled dog mail carrier
In the 1930s, airplanes gradually began to replace sled dog mail teams. Planes were faster and cheaper than teams of voracious canines. But the time and cost savings “came at a heavy price: abandoned trails, broken connections between communities, and the loss of the steady stream of news from mail carriers,” according to Peggy Dillon in her review of Schneider’s book.
In a few places like the remote St. Lawrence Island in the middle of the Bering Strait, where archaeological evidence of domesticated dogs has been found dating back to 400-800 AD, sled dog mail carriers persisted for several decades beyond the 1930s. Although air strips were built in the island’s two largest communities of Gambell and Savoonga, frequent weather often made it impossible for planes to land. Aviation’s unreliability meant that sled dog mail service was still essential.
A St. Lawrence Yupik man named Chester Tapghaghhmii Noongwook worked as the town’s trusty sled dog mail carrier, making 100-mile runs between Gambell, on the island’s northwest, and Savoonga, on the middle of the island’s northern coast.
Alaska ceased being a territory and became a state in 1959, just prior to the presidential race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. Noongwook was still delivering mail with his sled dog team then, so it is quite possible that he and his dogs did carry some ballots for one presidential election and perhaps even many other non-federal elections before that. (Nixon, in case you were wondering, won Alaska by 1,144 votes out of a total of 60,762 votes cast.)
A few months after Kennedy declared in September 1962, “We choose to go to the moon,” the era of sled dog mail carriers in Alaska would finally come to end. As the era of animal-powered movement was coming to a close, the space race was taking off.
On January 8, 1963, Noongwook made his last 100-mile mail run from Gambell to Savoonga. After the sled dog mail service ended, Noongwook went to work in the service of the very technology that had displaced his previous business, joining regional air carrier Wien and Munz.
Chester Noongwook getting his sled dogs ready for their last mail run on January 8, 1963 between Gambell and Savoonga.
Source: Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, Ward W. Wells Collection, AMRC-wws-1867-C-82
Traditional and modern technologies intersect in bewildering ways
Yet in rural Alaska—as across much of the Arctic—traditional and modern technologies continued to intersect in bewildering ways. The combustion that powered rockets to the moon, for instance, helped breathe new life into traditional practices like whaling.
In 1972, a little over decade after his last mail run to Savoonga, Noongwook joined the village’s newly established whaling crew, helping to land its first-ever bowhead whale. Savoonga, which has historically hunted walrus, was able to establish a whaling crew thanks to the arrival of petroleum-powered snowmachines, which could carry the heavy skinboats needed for whaling 30 miles across the island to Pugughileq, on the southern shore. Generations ago, whaling had been carried out there, as a research article led by George Noongwook explains, but the community had long been abandoned. Snowmachines made it re-accessible and allowed the descendants of Pugughileq’s old whaling crews to revive the traditional subsistence activity of hunting cetaceans.
A legend on St. Lawrence Island, Noongwook—Yupik Elder, dog sled musher, airline employee, Alaska National Guardsman, whaler, father, grandfather and great-grandfather—passed away at the age of 87 in January 2020. With him, too, have disappeared memories of the vital role that sled dogs did in fact play in Alaska’s mail service up through the second half of the twentieth century—and likely its election logistics, too. If only Noongwook could have commented on the heated debate over whether sled dogs ever delivered ballots in Alaska, we might have learned firsthand that once, in living memory, they really may have. ▢
A few months after Kennedy declared in September 1962, “We choose to go to the moon,” the era of sled dog mail carriers in Alaska would finally come to end. As the era of animal-powered movement was coming to a close, the space race was taking off.
Through the centuries sled dogs in Alaska, like the rest of the Arctic, have endured long distances, blizzards and hardship to deliver mail - and votes from rural and remote places. JONAA©Kristjan Fridriksson
Mia Bennett is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and School of Modern Languages & Cultures (China Studies Programme) at the University of Hong Kong and editor of the Cryopolitics blog. Through fieldwork and remote sensing, she researches the politics of infrastructure development in frontier spaces, namely the Arctic and areas included within China's Belt and Road Initiative. This article is published as a part of media collaboration between Cryopolitics and JONAA.
