Fairbanks North Star Borough voters will be asked a pair of ballot questions Oct. 6 that could shake up how the borough runs local elections in years to come.
If approved, one of them would change the date of the borough election, which now happens the first Tuesday in October each year. It would move to the same day as the state and federal elections in November, the Tuesday after the first Monday in that month, if voters approve Proposition 2. The other measure, Proposition 3, would introduce a hand count-only method for tallying votes in borough elections and ban the use of machine tabulators for producing or certifying official counts. Both would be in effect come the 2027 election.
The questions intersect with issues that’ve captured the spotlight locally, nationally and in other municipalities in Alaska, like the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, which now hand counts ballots cast in November after implementing a similar set of changes to its election that took effect in 2019 and 2023, respectively.
Apart from what backers and opponents argue as definitive political pros and cons of the two ideas, there’s a degree of uncertainty as to how different combinations of their passage or failure would affect the cities of Fairbanks and North Pole operationally. The FNSB administers elections for the cities, which fall within the borough but have their own municipal governments.
FNSB Clerk April Trickey said by email that “there are many what if’s at this point between the Borough’s Prop 2 and 3 outcomes and how that will affect our partnership in conducting elections.”
She said, following the election, the borough and city clerks will figure out how the relationship will function in future years.
But Trickey said one thing is more certain: If dates for the borough and city elections don’t match up, “the Borough would no longer partner with the cities to conduct their elections. The Cities would have full responsibility to conduct their elections.”
Proposition 3
If local voters approve Prop 3 – the hand count – on Oct. 6, Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Grier Hopkins predicts some major drawbacks.
“I’m not excited about spending more money, and it’s going to be more expensive. I’m not excited about less accuracy, and it’s going to be less accurate,” he said.
Former borough Assemblymember Barbara Haney, who’s this year running as a Republican for state House against incumbent Rep. Mike Prax, R-North Pole, argues pretty much the opposite.
She’s one of the people behind the citizens’ initiative that collected signatures to get the question on the borough ballot. Haney said paying more for workers to conduct the count would keep the money circulating locally, compared to contracting with voting-tech company Dominion, now called Liberty Vote following its acquisition last year.
“You can achieve cost savings. They may not be much, but they will be cost savings. And the money will be spent in the borough, by borough voters to borough voters,” she said.
Election experts have generally found hand counts to be more expensive, slower and less accurate than machine counts. Haney pointed to a 2024 news report that said the Mat-Su Borough clerk believed the switch to hand counting in its 2023 local election provided a little bit of savings, though the amount wasn’t specified.
KUAC did not receive responses to questions emailed to the Mat-Su Borough clerk seeking more details in time for this story. Trickey said by email that the Fairbanks borough hasn’t done a fiscal analysis of changing to hand count only.
The Fairbanks borough currently uses optical scan machines to tally votes. In March 2025, the Assembly 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, and the rejection of the five-year renewal made it so the Assembly would instead be asked to appropriate funds for it on a yearly basis during the annual budget process, borough officials said last year.
About a month later, in April 2025, the Assembly passed an ordinance establishing a process to manually audit randomly sampled ballots. In the first go-round last October, the more than 3,300 hand-audited ballots matched machine tabulations perfectly.
Hopkins said the audit was a good compromise to help instill confidence in voters. Haney said the limited hand count shows the method could work at a larger scale.
“We’re already hand counting, and so why not just do the hand count and get rid of the machine count? Our people can count these ballots just fine,” she said.
City of Fairbanks Mayor Mindy O’Neall sees it much differently. She served two terms on the borough Assembly, including three years that overlapped with Haney’s tenure. O’Neall voted against introducing the hand count audit in 2025. She said it wasn’t necessary, and that the attempt to take it a step further seems rooted in “fear-mongering.”
“I think it builds on a national rhetoric that we have a problem with our elections, that they’re not fair or that they’re somehow biased based on a particular type of machinery, but there’s not evidence that backs that up,” she said.
After initially rejecting the petition Haney submitted in July, Trickey certified it last week, securing Prop 3’s spot on the borough ballot. The original petition had an adequate number of total signatures, but 108 were deemed invalid, according to Trickey.
She said reasons for their invalidation included duplicate signatures, signees not registered to vote in the borough, as well as illegible or missing information. Assemblymember Tammie Wilson filed a supplementary petition on Aug. 4 with the additional signatures needed to reach the required mark of 2,391, Trickey said.
Proposition 2
Wilson, a former Republican state lawmaker, also had a hand in acquiring signatures for Prop 2, which will ask voters if they want to shift the borough’s October municipal election to the same day state and federal elections happen in November. She submitted the petition in mid-June to get the question on the ballot, and the borough clerk certified it six days later.
Wilson said matching up local races with the higher profile elections is about improving voter turnout.
“When getting the signatures many people said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know we voted in October,’ which is exactly the reason for the initiative,” she said.
And she said she thinks November is just a better time of year for voters.
“Between hunting season, the cold and getting ready for winter to settle in, those just kind of take all that extra time and people just forget that voting is open for the October election,” she said.
The idea isn’t new to the borough. The Assembly in recent years has twice narrowly rejected ordinances that would’ve made the same change, once in 2022 and once in 2023.
O’Neall, the current City of Fairbanks mayor and a former Assembly member, voted against the ordinances both times. She worries that aligning the local and statewide elections would consolidate demand for a limited pool of election workers. And she said it could drown out the messages of local candidates if they’re competing for voter attention at the same time as multi-million dollar campaigns.
“The air in the room gets sucked out pretty fast by those larger campaigns, and these often small, grassroots campaigns can get lost in the shuffle, if you will,” she said.
O’Neall also rejects a core part of the argument from those who favor the switch, saying voter turnout wouldn’t necessarily increase.
Proponents, like Wilson, have pointed to the Mat-Su Borough, which in 2019 started running its local election the same day as state and federal elections. The MSB saw record turnout the cleared 40% in 2022 and approached 50% in 2024, but it has still dipped significantly in odd years, when there weren’t statewide races happening. In 2025, Mat-Su Borough turnout was under 14%, according to election results.
For comparison, turnout in the Fairbanks North Star Borough election has consistently hovered in the 20% to 25% range over the last few years.
As for the cities of North Pole and Fairbanks, when the borough Assembly last considered the date change through ordinance, their city councils passed resolutions in favor of keeping municipal elections in October.
This year, the City of North Pole, like the borough, also is asking voters if they want to move city elections to November. There isn’t a similar question on the ballot in the City of Fairbanks, though the election date can also be changed by ordinance, according to the city charter.