Undemocratic Elections Director Carol Beecher's Big Voter Purge!

Here's a fun thing that happened while you were out enjoying your summer! The State of Alaska quietly moved around 3,500 of your neighbors onto the inactive voter list, flagged them as possible noncitizens, and mailed them letters asking them to please prove their citizenship. This happened just weeks before our August 18 primary election.

When the Division of Elections runs its routine quarterly check of the voter rolls against DMV records, it typically turns up about 200 names for a closer look. That's the number Undemocratic Elections Director Carol Beecher cited to legislators at this week's Joint House Judiciary and State Affairs committee hearing. Last year, the entire inactive list contained 541 registrations flagged as possible noncitizens.

This time, approximately 3,500 were flagged, many of them erroneously, resulting in citizens having their voting status flipped to "inactive." Beecher claims she doesn't know why so many more names were flagged this go-round!

So who are these thousands of potentially fraudulent voters? Based on reporting so far, they appear to be naturalized American citizens. People who got an Alaska driver's license or identification card before they naturalized, then later became citizens, then registered to vote like they're entitled to do.

Now, here's where the Dunleavy administration starts eating itself. On Wednesday, Beecher told the House Judiciary and State Affairs Committee that she thought a lot of old data might have been somehow picked up - pointing a finger at the DMV, saying she wasn't sure why the list was so unusually YUGE. Then, on Thursday, the DMV's director's office released a memo that says it was Beecher's division that sent the DMV a list of roughly 15,200 license and ID applicants back in March and asked for citizenship information on all of them.

The Alaska DMV called it "a non-routine request." 👀

This raises two questions we don't yet know the answer to. Why did Beecher omit that important detail when she was in front of the joint committee and from where did her division procure the list of 15,200 license and ID applications?

I also wouldn't mind knowing the party affiliations of the 15,200 names her division submitted to the Alaska DMV as well as the party affiliations of the 3,500 names returned by the DMV. Seems relevant.

Last December, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom directed the state to hand over extended copies of Alaska's voter rolls to the Justice Department, which is feeding data into an error-prone DHS citizenship tool that ProPublica found has already falsely flagged U.S. citizens. Also in December, Beecher signed a memo with Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon agreeing that Alaska will yank voters off the active list whenever the feds order them to.

Carol Beecher is not some rando clerk who wandered into the wrong hearing room. She is the director of the Undemocratic Division of Elections, and her division made what the Alaska DMV said was a non-routine request for citizenship data on 15,200 Alaskans. Four months later she sat in front of a joint legislative committee, on the record, and told lawmakers she wasn't sure how the list DMV provided got so big!

Either Beecher knew what her own office provided to the DMV and lied to the committee's face, or the person running Alaska's elections genuinely does not know what her division is doing with the voter rolls four weeks before the primary election.

Pick whichever answer comforts you, but either would end with her resignation in any state that took her purge of eligible voters seriously. While she 'assured' the committee this had "nothing to do with" the federal government, it's inescapable that she was the only one who personally signed a confidential memo with Trump's DOJ promising that her division would strip voters from the active list whenever the feds point at them.

This would be easier to write off as a bad day if it weren't proof of Beecher's entire body of work. It was, after all, Carol Beecher who illegally purged Petersburg Dan Sullivan from the U.S. Senate ballot on a completely fabricated "good faith" theory so flimsy the Alaska Supreme Court threw it out.

If you received one of these letters, or if you naturalized in the last few years, check your registration right now at myvoterinformation.alaska.gov. Then contact the Division of Undemocratic Elections and keep calling until a human answers.

The primary is August 18. Don't let a MAGA agent keep you from exercising your right to vote.