For the last several weeks, a coalition of Alaskan organizations successfully organized statewide Election Protection programs to support generating historic voter turnout in our communities. This investment by the Alaska Civic Engagement State (AKCES) Table made Alaska the 40th state in the country to affiliate with the Election Protection Coalition – a national, nonpartisan coalition working to advance and protect …
Alaska’s latest election lawsuit would give absentee voters a chance to fix mail-in ballot errors
A lawsuit is seeking to give absentee voters in Alaska a chance to fix mail-in ballot errors that would prevent their votes from being counted. The lawsuit was filed last week by the Alaska Center Education Fund, Alaska Public Interest Research Group and Sitka resident Floyd Tomkins. While voters are able to fix ballot mistakes in some municipal elections, Alaska …
Leg With Louie: two things you can do today
The Dunleavy Administration has officially squashed hopes that it will pursue a broad vote at home effort anytime soon. The announcement by Lt. Governor Kevin Meyer that Alaska will not conduct a vote at home for the August primary. The legislature provided the Administration with authority, but no mandate to conduct a statewide vote at home in its COVID-19 response …
Leg With louie: To Bag or not To Bag
The Novel Coronavirus has caused changes in how we interact. With people, with time itself, and with things. Wearing or not wearing a mask in public has become a political act to some. Distillers of fine gin are now distilling sanitizing hand gel. Single-use plastic bags are temporarily rescued from their glide path to oblivion by frontline retail workers deeming …
Our economy won’t recover without child care reform
Economy means management of home. But the short-sighted efforts to “reopen the economy” reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of what a whole, healthy and functioning economy looks like, and a complete disregard for the foundation of home: our families. Our economic production is dependent upon child care, yet our economic model has neglected to put our home and families at the …
Leg with Louie: Toward an Electric Tomorrow
Imagine, some future day after a bruising legislative session, our legislators and staff head homeward from Juneau, in quiet vehicles that require little maintenance, have zero CO2 emissions, and that glide lightly along the highway. By the time they reached their home districts, all of the accumulated malice, rancor, and ill-will of a typical session would be gone, replaced by …
Leg With Louie: Building the new economy starts now
Yours may be cowboys, Willie, but my heroes have always been journalists. Even today, in the middle of the daily whirlwind of sheep-dip and gibberish from our highest officer in the land, with uncertainty on all horizons and a pandemic at our door, journalists are out there asking questions, arranging facts, allowing citizens a foothold of logic in the world …
A climate change wake-up call
The Anchorage Daily News recently published an article entitled, “It’s November, and Southcentral Alaska’s unusually warm fall has some plants putting out spring buds.” If that’s not a wake-up call about climate change, I don’t know what is. Of course, the scariest, hottest, smokiest, summer ever in Alaska should have been enough of a wake-up call about what may have …
Governor’s cabinet-level picks all confirmed by the Alaska Legislature
JUNEAU, Alaska (KTUU) — Three of the governor’s controversial picks to run state agencies have been confirmed by a joint session of the Alaska Legislature. Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner Jason Brune had come under scrutiny for his previous work as a public face of the Pebble Partnership, with some lawmakers voicing concerns that he may struggle to regulate the …
The Anchorage election and clean energy
In the recent Anchorage election, voters sent a strong message about the future they want: one that is secure, just and thriving. Climate change poses one of the greatest threats to that future, and we need leadership that will dare to tackle it head-on. Right now, Anchorage has an urgent and exciting opportunity to address this challenge and set the …