New: Joint Statement Shows the Purge List Started at Beecher's Own Desk
All we know for certain is that between Thursday and Friday, somebody in the Lieutenant Governor’s office decided the two agencies needed to stop shooting at each other in public.
Well, that was fast! On Friday afternoon, the Office of the Lieutenant Governor released a joint statement from the Division of Elections and the DMV. Buried in its five sentences of bureaucratic Febreze is the confession we already knew was coming thanks to James Brooks' bombshell reporting on the matter.
“Elections most recently asked DMV to compare lists in March 2026, resulting in the 3000 letters that Elections recently sent.”
On Wednesday, Beecher sat before a joint legislative committee and testified that she wasn’t sure why the list was so enormous, musing that old data got picked up “somehow,” laying blame at the feet of the DMV. Then, on Thursday, the DMV’s director’s office released a memo revealing that it was Beecher’s own division that sent over approximately 15,200 records in March and asked for citizenship information on all of them, a request the DMV pointedly labeled “non-routine."
Quick recap - Beecher's Wednesday testimony raised questions, the DMV called the division's March request "non-routine" on Thursday, and then on Friday, DMV Director Kathleen Wallace co-signed a statement whitewashing the latest drama as just the sort of thing the Division of Undemocratic Elections does periodically. Both of those last things cannot be true. All we know for certain is that between Thursday and Friday, somebody in the Lieutenant Governor’s office decided the two agencies needed to stop shooting at each other in public.
Still, there are problems with the newest statement. For example, it doesn’t explain where Beecher obtained the list of 15,200 names she sent to the DMV in March and doesn’t acknowledge that naturalized citizens were wrongly flagged. It also fails to address why some Alaskans didn't receive the letter until July when they were dated in June.
But importantly, it doesn't apologize to a single naturalized citizen whose voting status was wrongly flipped to inactive.
The Judiciary Committee’s written questions are coming, and at the top of the list should be this one: if this was routine list maintenance you’ve done for years, Director, where did you get the list of 15,200 names that you submitted in March, and why didn't you just say that last Wednesday?
