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Prop 2 Debate

When Two Lawyers Argue Over How Alaska Votes

Craig Richards and Scott Kendall have faced each other in court a half-dozen times. On Monday night at the Petroleum Club, they faced each other in front of a room.

Scott Kendall had the microphone and a question he had clearly been saving.

Richards had just finished his opening statement, in which he called the 2020 ballot measure that created Alaska’s open primary and ranked choice voting “a log roll of all log rolls.” So Kendall asked the obvious follow-up. If the original measure was objectionable because it bundled campaign finance transparency in with the voting changes, why does Ballot Measure 2 repeal the transparency rules too? Why go back to a system where outsiders can give anonymously through intermediary groups?

Richards did not hesitate. “Scott, you wrote it, and you rolled them all together,” he said. Complaining that the repeal takes the whole package is “a little bit like, you know, kill your parents and pleading for mercy because you’re an orphan.”

Kendall came back just as fast. “You’re far too experienced an attorney to make such a foolish argument that you can’t repeal whatever pieces you want.” A partial repeal was on the ballot two years ago, he pointed out. It was plainly legal. So why repeal something “over 90% of Alaskans like”?

“The overreach here was you jamming 15 different things in one bill,” Richards answered.

“You have ended that conversation before it started,” Kendall said.

That was the first four minutes.

The Measure on the Table

Commonwealth North convened the debate because Alaskans will vote on Ballot Measure 2 in November, and the organization takes no position on it. Moderator Jon Katchen, an Anchorage attorney, said as much from the podium: the job was to put the strongest version of each argument in front of the room and let people decide.

He also laid out what a yes vote does. It repeals the open primary, in which every candidate appears on one ballot and the top four advance regardless of party. It restores party-run primaries. It repeals ranked choice voting in the general election, returning to one vote for one candidate. And it repeals the campaign finance disclosure rules adopted in 2020, which require groups spending on Alaska elections to report their true funding sources.

The history matters here. Voters adopted the current system in 2020. A repeal measure failed in 2024 by 743 votes after a recount. The sponsors gathered signatures again, and the question is back.

The two men arguing it are not neutral observers. Richards served as Alaska’s attorney general from 2014 to 2016 and represents Repeal Now, the campaign sponsoring Ballot Measure 2. Kendall, counsel at Cashion Gilmore & Lindemuth and former chief of staff to Governor Bill Walker, was the prime author of the 2020 measure and has defended it in court. Both were speaking for a side. That is the point of a debate, and the format, a variant of Lincoln-Douglas with cross-examination, was chosen to make them answer for it.

Who Counts the Votes

Richards opened with a Russian joke. A friend in Fairbanks who married a Russian woman likes to quote the line attributed to Stalin: it isn’t the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes. Richards looked it up. Stalin never said it. His secretary, Boris Bazhanov, did, and the actual quotation is worse: what matters is “who will count the votes, and how.”

That, Richards argued, is the heart of the matter. Alaska used to count votes the traditional American way. One person, one vote, most votes wins. In 2020, “liberal campaign operatives in Alaska, funded by a few liberal megadonors from outside,” changed the counting to change the outcomes.

His case rests on two mechanisms. The first is what he calls the jungle primary. When multiple candidates from the same party advance to the general election, the antagonism of the primary carries over, and the party that gets only one major candidate through has a structural edge. “Ironically,” he noted, “that tends to be the party that gets the less total votes.” He pointed to 2022, when Sarah Palin and Nick Begich split the Republican vote and Mary Peltola won the U.S. House seat.

The second mechanism is exhausted ballots. Some voters don’t rank all the way through, whether by error, by refusal, or by confusion. Richards conceded he has seen no research on the psychology of it. But the effect, in his telling, is that those ballots drop out before the final round. In the 2022 special election, he said, roughly 15,000 ballots were exhausted before Peltola won by 5,129 votes, and 60 percent of first-round votes had gone to candidates who were not Democrats.

Then he made a prediction. This year’s governor’s race has one Democrat, Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, against three Republicans, after Democrat Tom Begich withdrew and endorsed him. “I don’t think you need a crystal ball,” Richards said. Kreiss-Tomkins will win, in his view, not because he is the better candidate or because Democrats are more popular, but “because, in this cycle, the Democrats play the game better than the Republicans.”

Game was the operative word. Richards meant it in the John Nash sense, a situation in which participants’ decisions determine the outcome. “The decisions the candidates make decide who wins, oftentimes over how people vote,” he argued. Begich dropping out was, to him, the proof. “What offends me is that we have an election system that rewards gamesmanship.”

Sixty-Four Percent

Kendall’s answer to nearly everything was a number.

Sixty-four percent of Alaskans are registered as nonpartisan, undeclared, or with a minor party. They account for 62 percent of primary turnout. About 53 percent of Alaskans, he said the data shows, do not vote a straight primary ticket when given the choice.

His central charge is that Ballot Measure 2 does not merely restore party primaries. By its own text, he argued, it gives each major party the statutory power to close its primary to nonpartisan and undeclared voters. “One presumes they made that policy choice,” he said. He does not believe the parties would leave that power unused; Republican state parties in South Carolina, Texas, and Louisiana have all sued to close their primaries. “It’s like Chekhov’s gun.”

On the vote-counting argument, Kendall simply disagreed with the premise. He named the counterexamples. In the 2022 governor’s race, two Republicans, one former Republican running as an independent, and a Democrat were on the ballot, and Republican Mike Dunleavy won with more than 50 percent in the first round. Lisa Murkowski ran against Kelly Tshibaka and Democrat Pat Chesbro, who finished around 6 percent. “The same ballot and the same voters elected Mary Peltola, Lisa Murkowski, and Mike Dunleavy,” he said. “They vote for the best person for the job, party be damned.”

Richards’s rejoinder: in every one of those races, the candidate who was the lone major candidate of a party won. He then moved on, which is the thing to do when your opponent has landed something and you have four minutes.

Kendall also rejected the idea that ranked choice voting “trashes” ballots. Every ballot is tabulated in every round, he said. A voter whose favorite cannot win is asked whether they prefer someone among the rest. “Sometimes voters do not. But it puts you in no different position at all than if you had voted for the third place candidate in the old system.”

And he closed with a document. In 2002, a ballot measure to bring ranked choice voting to Alaska was sponsored by the Libertarian Party, the Independence Party, the Green Party, the Republican Moderate Party, and the Republican Party of Alaska. He read from their ballot statement. Majority winners. No wasted votes. No spoilers. “Ranked choice voting is good government at its best.” Then he asked the room: if it was a good idea then, sponsored by the Republican Party, how is it a terrible liberal idea now?

Richards never answered that one directly. Worth noting.

Our Billionaires and Theirs

The dark money portion of the evening was the most personal, because both men have clients in it.

Kendall put faces on the screen. Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire. Elon Musk, who gave $1.5 million. “The only reason we Alaskans know those two donated to this campaign is because of the very law that they are trying to repeal.” He also noted that Ballot Measure 1, which restored contribution limits and passed in August with 72 percent, would have its limits for governor and lieutenant governor repealed by Ballot Measure 2 before they ever take effect.

Richards answered from the other direction. Alaska had a solid disclosure regime before 2020, he argued, with 30-day and 24-hour reporting for large donors to independent expenditure groups. What the 2020 rules added, in his view, was “a reporting slog,” and a one-sided one. He has watched clients hauled before APOC over minor technical deficiencies even after hiring professional compliance help. “Good riddance to bad bureaucracy,” he said, adding that if a legislature wants to re-enact something like it, it should be balanced.

Then he turned Kendall’s slide around. Alaskans for Better Elections, he argued, routes money through a 501(c)(4) that need not disclose donors for overhead and legal fees, and through a national PAC, Unite America, where Alaska-earmarked money cannot be traced. He asked Kendall to name Unite America’s three largest contributors earmarking funds to Alaska. Kendall said he did not have that information at his fingertips and that every donor is on the APOC report. “Our billionaires are worse than his billionaires, I think is what those slides basically come down to,” Richards told the room. “If you’re gonna play in a game where one side is funded by billionaires, you gotta find your own billionaires.”

Kendall’s reply came during the Q&A, when he asked for a show of hands. How many people in the room had personally given $2,000 or more to a super PAC? “Congratulations, the rule does not apply to you.” He traced the Musk money: a check to America PAC, which wrote a check to Aurora Action Network, which wrote a check to Repeal Now. Without true-source disclosure, he said, the report would simply read “Aurora Action Network.”

He quoted Antonin Scalia on disclosure as the antiseptic of elections. Richards, for his part, had cited the Supreme Court on the burden of hiring campaign finance lawyers to give money. Two attorneys, two Supreme Court citations, no resolution. The reader is left where the room was.

The Room Talks Back

The audience questions were sharper than most.

State Senator Matt Claman of West Anchorage offered a history lesson first: Alaska used blanket primaries, everyone on one ballot, from 1947 to 1960 and again from the mid-1960s until 1992. Why go against that history? Richards said Repeal Now is “fairly agnostic” on the open-primary question and that he personally thought the two-ballot system of 2020 worked fine. His objection is to forcing same-party candidates into the general, not to who gets which ballot.

Claman then asked why Richards, “as a seasoned trial lawyer,” had misstated the constitution. Article XI says an initiative cannot be repealed for two years, but it can be amended at any time. Richards said he had taken the point from Kendall. “I should find better lawyers to listen to. That’s my mistake.” The room laughed. The distinction between amendment and repeal was not resolved from the podium, and it is not a small one, since Kendall’s argument about dark money rules being immutable for two years depends on it.

Jim Minnery, identifying himself as a conservative Republican, asked Kendall about his liberal friends who are voting yes for two words: Tom Begich. They thought the system was about more choice, and then the system pushed their candidate out. Kendall did not defend the withdrawal. “I thought Tom should have stayed in,” he said. But he also thought Kelly Tshibaka should have dropped out a few years ago, and she didn’t. “You can’t control for candidate quality, and you can’t control for the candidate’s choice.”

Former state senator and gubernatorial candidate Shelley Hughes asked whether ranked choice voting disenfranchises seniors, minorities, and voters whose first language is not English, and whether it had reduced negative campaigning as promised. Kendall said he takes the first question personally, having been raised by a single mother disabled by polio. But the data, he said, shows spoilage rates at or below the old system’s, and almost every major minority-community organization in the state, from AFN to the NAACP, has supported keeping the system. On negativity, he conceded the point. “I think we have seen through social media and otherwise, it hasn’t reduced it.”

A questioner named Paul Butera asked Richards the practical version of the Begich question: under a closed primary, wouldn’t Kreiss-Tomkins have advanced anyway? Yes, Richards said, but against one Republican, not three.

A nonpartisan voter named Bob Butera said he loves the new system because he no longer has to choose which party’s primary ballot to take. Richards, again, said he didn’t feel strongly about the ballot question. Kendall added a name: Senator John Coghill, “one of the finest human beings I’ve ever met in politics,” lost his 2020 Republican primary when 5 percent of his constituents voted against him. “People like John Coghill should be on the general election ballot so that all voters can have their say.”

The last word before the closing question went to Judy Brady, who was Commonwealth North’s executive director under both Wally Hickel and Bill Egan, and later its first woman president. She said she had been laughing a little, imagining the two governors in the room listening to this. They disagreed about nearly everything, she recalled, except one thing.

“Everybody got to speak, and everybody got to vote.”