ANCHORAGE — Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott said Thursday that he saw no substantive problems during his visit to rural communities to monitor voting in this week’s primary election.
He also said he got the impression from the U.S. Department of Justice that this was a good first statewide election following last year’s settlement of a lawsuit over the translation of voting materials for voters with limited English proficiency.
Mallott and Division of Elections Director Josie Bahnke were among the state officials who met with Justice Department representatives Thursday to discuss Tuesday’s elections. The department had election watchers in Alaska.
Messages left for a Department of Justice spokesman and an attorney for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit weren’t immediately returned.
Provisions of the settlement in a case brought by Alaska Native plaintiffs include increased language assistance for three census areas. Mallott visited three rural villages — Manokotak, Togiak and New Stuyahok — in the region affected by the order.
He said there were some “little glitches,” such as a lack of private areas to cast a ballot in New Stuyahok. That was remedied by people going to a corner of a table where they could be alone to vote.
In Manokotak, Mallott said, an electronic voting machine wasn’t working so paper ballots were used all day. Bahnke said later that every precinct has paper ballots but some communities prefer to use touch screens to ease in quick tallying of results.
“There was nothing substantive that either the DOJ or our own folks saw,” Mallott told reporters during a conference call. “And so it’s just continuing the process, making it work, being responsive to those issues that are raised.”
Bahnke said her division would need to provide more training to bilingual outreach workers to better assist voters. She didn’t know how many people asked for language assistance Tuesday.
She and Mallott noted that the general election would be different because ballot measures will need to be translated. There were no ballot measures in the primary.
Attorneys for the state and plaintiffs flagged for the federal judge overseeing the case a potential concern with translating the legal text of the ballot measures into Alaska Native languages for an election pamphlet. But they said they believed they had found a workable solution that would leave the law section only in English. Other pieces — including the ballot measure language and pro, con and neutral statements — would be translated into different languages.
In correspondence filed with the judge, Libby Bakalar, an assistant attorney general, said the concern dealt partly with translators lacking the legal expertise necessary to ensure that any summary of the law itself would be accurate.
