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By Lars Hanson
Associate News Editor
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For about 20 years, Thomas Evans helped set up the voting booths in the community center in Nanwalek, Alaska, and checked in his neighbors as they came through the door.
In those years, the 1980s and '90s, he remembers most of the village turning out. Now, he said, there is no regular precinct polling place in the village on Election Day.
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"There's no polling place anymore," Evans told Newsweek. It has "really kind of handicapped our village, not being able to turn in a reliable count for who the people want."
Nanwalek is one of at least 18 rural Alaska communities named in a lawsuit filed Thursday that accuses the state of advertising in-person voting sites that then failed to open. Most are Alaska Native villages reachable only by plane or boat. The case reaches a courtroom Monday morning, less than 24 hours before polls open in a U.S. Senate race that polls show is within a point or two.
The state’s website lists Nanwalek’s absentee in-person site as open since Oct. 19, when in-person voting began. But the lawsuit says the site was not operating that week, and a crowd-sourced tracker paid for by the 907 Initiative, a political group, reports that it did not open until Oct. 30. Asked directly when the site opened, a Division of Elections spokesperson referred Newsweek to its same website listing. Newsweek could not independently confirm when the site opened. If the lawsuit and the tracker are correct, Nanwalek voters had no place in the village to vote in person for the first 11 days of early voting.
What the lawsuit claims
The suit, Midnight Sun Independence Fund v. Dahlstrom, was filed Oct. 29 in Anchorage Superior Court against Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher, and the division itself. It argues that closing advertised sites without notice violates the right to vote and the guarantee of due process in the Alaska Constitution. It asks the court to order every listed site opened. Judge Thomas Matthews set a hearing for 9 a.m. Monday.
The Alaska Democratic Party and a group of rural state lawmakers filed a similar suit Friday. The party says the closures likely violate a federal consent decree in Toyukak v. Dahlstrom that requires the state to provide Yup’ik language assistance to voters in Western Alaska.
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Alaskans can vote in person during the 15 days before an election. In most of rural Alaska, that means absentee in-person voting: a local official hands out the ballot, the voter seals it in an envelope, and it is counted later. According to the complaint, 18,158 people voted that way in 2024.
The complaint says at least 18 sites listed on the division's website were not operating the week of Oct. 19: Alakanuk, Chignik Bay, Chistochina, Ekwok, Gambell, Goodnews Bay, Holy Cross, Huslia, Kongiganak, Manokotak, Mountain Village, Nanwalek, Napaskiak, Newhalen, Pedro Bay, Pilot Station, Quinhagak and Toksook Bay. Some local officials never received ballots or instructions, it says, and others got materials but no training. Residents reported five more closed sites in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
The state disputes the scale. According to the complaint, in an Oct. 26 letter to state Sen. Bill Wielechowski, who first raised the alarm, Beecher wrote that 12 of the 18 sites had confirmed they were open, three had declined to open, and three had not responded. She did not say which were which.
Asked by Newsweek to identify the sites in each group, the division did not say.
Beecher wrote that each site had signed an agreement listing its location and hours, and the division said it had mailed ballots to absentee voting officials in 109 Western Alaska communities, according to the AP and Alaska Public Media.
As of Sunday, the division's own website listed three sites as "temporarily closed" — Goodnews Bay, Kongiganak and Mertarvik — and removed three others: Chignik Bay, Fort Wainwright and Levelock.
In its complaint, Midnight Sun Independence Fund describes itself as a nonprofit focused on voter education in rural Alaska. The group, based in Washington, D.C., is not obligated to name its donors. It also ranks among the biggest funders of the Midnight Sun PAC, whose independent ad spending in support of Democrat Mary Peltola’s Senate bid has topped $4 million since July, the Anchorage Daily News reported, citing Federal Election Commission data.
What it takes to vote in Nanwalek
The lawsuit singles out Nanwalek. It says the village has no regular precinct polling place for the 2026 general election, and that if its absentee in-person voting site is unavailable, Nanwalek voters must travel to Tyonek, a Dena’ina village on the far side of Cook Inlet.
But the state announced Sept. 22 that Nanwalek was among 10 Permanent Absentee Voting communities where absentee in-person voting would be extended through Election Day, Nov. 3. The state’s website lists the Nanwalek IRA Office and Community Center as open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. that day.
State records are consistent with the absence of a regular Nanwalek precinct. Nanwalek does not appear in the dropdown menu of the Division of Elections’ online Election Day polling-place lookup, a Newsweek review found. Redistricting in 2021 moved Nanwalek and neighboring Port Graham into House District 37, and no Nanwalek precinct appears in that district’s official results for the 2022 general election or the 2024 primary.
The lawsuit’s account of Tyonek matches the 907 Initiative’s tracker, which lists Tyonek as the Election Day polling place for both Nanwalek and nearby Port Graham.
Evans described what reaching Tyonek would mean in practice. A round-trip flight to Homer, the nearest hub, runs about $200, he said. From there, a voter would drive north to Kenai and board another plane across the inlet.
"There's no way that people could afford to go across to Homer and then have to drive to Kenai, then get in the airplane again," he said. "They just couldn't afford it."
Evans, who now lives in Anchorage, believes the village lost its polling place in the early 2000s. He said turnout fell drastically, and residents were left asking why. "Nobody really understood what was going on," he said. "Nobody ever explained anything to anyone."
State records back up part of his account. In the 2000 general election, Nanwalek still had its own precinct, listed under the village’s former name, English Bay, and about 60 percent of its registered voters cast ballots there. In 2022, about 6 percent of registered voters in the Tyonek precinct, where the lawsuit and the tracker say Nanwalek voters are now assigned, cast ballots there. Neither figure includes absentee ballots, which the state reports by district.
Today, he said, ballots are mailed to each household. But in a community that lives by hunting and fishing, a ballot is easy to set aside. And the mail itself is unreliable. "Sometimes it's over a week before the plane can make it into the village due to weather," Evans said. The state made a similar point this year in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, telling the justices that mail delivery in remote Alaska "isn't guaranteed," according to the complaint.
Evans, a former tribal liaison, used to explain village life to audiences in the Lower 48. They pictured people driving to a Safeway, he said. In Nanwalek, getting groceries can mean a flight across the bay. Getting to a polling place is no different.
Evans, who no longer lives in the village, said he did not know whether the absentee site had opened this year. The 907 Initiative’s tracker reports that it opened Oct. 30 and that voters have been casting ballots there since.
The state’s website gives a different date. As of Sunday, the Division of Elections listed the site at the Nanwalek IRA Office and Community Center as open weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. starting Oct. 19, and from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Election Day. The listing had last been updated Sept. 25.
The 907 Initiative's tracker shows that several sites named in the lawsuit opened more than a week late, while others were still closed as of Oct. 30.
Why a few hundred votes matter
In most years, a handful of shuttered village sites would be a local story. This year, they sit inside one of the closest Senate races in the country.
Peltola, a Yup'ik former congresswoman, is trying to unseat Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. The RealClearPolitics average of polls taken Oct. 8 to 30 shows Peltola at 49.2 percent and Sullivan at 47.8 percent, a gap well inside any poll's margin of error. Alaska Survey Research's latest poll, taken Oct. 26 to 29, put Peltola ahead 51 to 49 in the final ranked-choice round.
Alaska has shown again and again how few votes can decide an election. Two years ago, Republican Nick Begich took the state's U.S. House seat from Peltola by 7,876 votes after ranked-choice tabulation, and a measure to repeal ranked-choice voting failed by 737 votes.
Separately, a federal judge on Sunday dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit that sought to block certification of the Senate result if Sullivan loses, citing possible voter confusion with a similarly named candidate on the ballot. The department said it will appeal.
What happens next
Newsweek emailed the Division of Elections on Sunday asking which of the 18 sites are open, whether Nanwalek's site has operated this year, and where Nanwalek voters are assigned to vote on Election Day.
Division spokesperson Steve Kirch did not answer those questions. In a written reply, he linked to the division’s lists of early voting sites and Election Day polling places and said voters can also cast ballots by mail, by electronic submission, at early voting sites or in person on Election Day.
“The Division does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation,” he wrote. The Election Day list does not include Nanwalek.
Newsweek also messaged Nanwalek residents on Facebook to ask whether an absentee in-person site had been set up there this year. None had responded by publication time.
Judge Matthews hears the Midnight Sun case at 9 a.m. Monday. Even if he orders every site opened, any village that gets one back will have little more than Election Day itself to use it.
Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Steven Frank.
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