Cast a ballot and wait for the plane. In Alaska, a grace period for ballots is seen as a necessity

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — 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 (177 kilometers) north of Fairbanks.

If the court decides ballots in all states must be received by Election Day, she 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.”

Some ballots already arrive late

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.

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.

'Seeing a level of voter intimidation’

The RNC argues such grace periods improperly extend elections for federal office, but Mississippi responded that no voting occurs after Election Day — only the delivery and counting of already completed ballots.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments as the U.S. Senate is debating legislation being pushed by President Donald Trump that would require people to show proof-of-citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot.

Taken together, Murkowski said such efforts could discourage people from voting.

“I think we're seeing a level of voter intimidation, I'll just say it,” she said. "I feel very, very strongly that the effort that we should be making at the federal level is to do all that we can to make our elections accessible, fair and transparent for every lawful voter out there.”

Alaska's other congressional members, Rep. Nick Begich and Sen. Dan Sullivan, both Republican allies of Trump who are seeking reelection this year, support the SAVE America Act now before the Senate. But they also said they want to ensure that ballots properly cast on or before Election Day get counted.

“We'll see what the courts choose to do on that issue, but I do think that we need to allow for time for ballots to come in from the rural parts of our state,” Begich said during a recent visit to Juneau.

Alaska officials highlight challenges to the court

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,” Cox and Lorence wrote.

Effect on Native voters

Lawyers with the Native American Rights Fund and Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center said in filings with the court that limited postal service in rural areas means that some ballots might not be postmarked until they reach Anchorage or Juneau, which can take days.

In the 2022 general election, between 55% and 78% of absentee ballots from the state House districts spanning from the Aleutian Islands up the western coast to the vast North Slope arrived at an election office after Election Day, they wrote. Statewide, about 20% of all absentee ballots in that election were received after Election Day.

Requiring ballots to be received by Election Day, they warned, would “disproportionately disenfranchise" Alaska Native voters. The lawyers represent the National Congress of American Indians, Native Vote Washington and the Alaska Federation of Natives.

Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote, a nonpartisan voting rights advocacy group affiliated with the Alaska Federation of Natives, worries about creating confusion and fear among voters.

She sees the case before the Supreme Court and the Republican SAVE Act as “a multipronged attempt to take control or wrest control of elections away from states." Alaska, she said, already has enough inherent barriers for many voters.

“There is a minute record of election fraud — not at the rate that requires this heavy-handed response through the legislature and the Supreme Court," she said.