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New Fairbanks North Star Borough election hand count audit aligns 100% with machine tabulations

Election workers perform the hand count audit inside the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly chambers Oct. 8, 2025.
Patrick Gilchrist/KUAC
Election workers perform the hand count audit inside the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly chambers Oct. 8, 2025.

The Fairbanks North Star Borough has completed a new hand count audit that featured for the first time in this year’s election. The manual verification turned up zero discrepancies.

That means a count by human beings found that the borough-owned Dominion Voting Systems machines tabulated votes 100% accurately for the thousands of sampled ballots.

The accuracy of the machines wasn’t a surprise to Borough Assemblymember David Guttenberg, but he said he’s delighted to see the extra layer of verification and thinks it could boost voter confidence. He sponsored an ordinance that narrowly passed this April that established the audit.

“People that think no election is honest or fair won’t take away anything from it. But I think the rest of us will have some satisfaction in thinking that, ‘Okay, the machines are counting correctly,’” he said. “And that gives them satisfaction that, ‘My vote counted, and it meant something.’”

Dominion was the voting technology company at the center of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in relation to the 2020 presidential election. The company announced last week that it has been acquired by an entity called Liberty Vote.

The borough ordinance requires the Borough Canvass Board to audit one randomly selected contested race from the early voting station, as well as one randomly selected contested race at two randomly selected precincts. The ordinance also created a process in the event a discrepancy of greater than 1% emerges between the hand count and machine tabulation.

Guttenberg said, despite this added evidence that the machines work, he thinks it’s important to keep the audit in place — especially since a future borough race could, in theory, be decided by just a handful of votes.

“Some time in the future we’ll have a borough election, a muni election, where it’s just one or two votes. And the random count might not be on that election, but it would still show us that the machines are still functioning accurately,” he said.

The canvass board began the crosscheck on Oct. 8, the day after the municipal election. Their report is now published as part of the assembly agenda packet for next week’s meeting, when election certification is scheduled.

The board hand-verified votes on a total of 3,338 ballots during the audit. Most of those – 2,846 – came from the early voting station; 492 came from the Goldstream No. 2 and Moose Creek precincts. The canvass board randomly picked School Board Seat C for the early voting station. Assembly Seat B was the random race they hand-checked for the other two precincts.

Incumbent Assemblymember Brett Rotermund ran for reelection to Seat B this year. He was unopposed until a late write-in campaign from Allegory Smith launched Sept. 22.

Rotermund voted against the hand count audit ordinance in April. At that meeting, he moved an amendment that called for including every race in the audit, but the borough clerk and some other assembly members noted that doing so would increase the time and money needed, and Rotermund’s amendment failed.

Rotermund said in a brief interview Thursday that he also expected that machine tabulations would be accurate. He said he voted against the final version of the ordinance because he wanted a bigger sample, but that he thought the measure was still a good compromise. And he said he thinks the roughly 3,300 ballots constitute a meaningful amount.

“That’s a fairly good sampling, and I think that was, honestly, I think that was the spirit of the ordinance,” he said. “I mean, that’s a fairly decent dataset right there, in my opinion.”

Guttenberg said he proposed the ordinance after learning the borough didn’t already have a similar manual verification process established. His ordinance also came about a month after a split vote by the Borough Finance Committee failed to renew a roughly $220,000, five-year, sole-source contract with Dominion that covered ballot programming services and annual licensing. That vote followed lengthy public testimony complaining about the cost of the contract and questioning the accuracy of the tabulators.

The borough already had funds lined up to cover the Dominion contract for this year. Borough Public Information Officer Kaitlin Wilson said by text Thursday that future funding for the contract is now set to appear on a year by year basis in the borough’s budget. Borough code specifies that ballots are to be tabulated electronically.

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