Fairbanks assembly votes to require hand count audit of election results

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTUU/KTVF) - The Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly voted at its Thursday meeting, 5-4 in favor of an ordinance requiring a hand-counted audit of election results in the borough.

The ordinance, brought forward by Assembly member David Guttenberg, changes borough code so that after ballots are processed and tabulated during an election, the canvass board will undergo a hand count of a contested race from two random precincts, as well as one contested race from early voting.

This information will serve as an audit of the machine count done on election night, the Assembly said.

“Hopefully, we’ll get more confidence in what we’re doing,” Guttenberg said, explaining the intent behind his ordinance, “and I think that’s just a natural outcome of what should be happening to verify what an election is.“

After a couple of amendments, Guttenberg, Scott Crass, Kristan Kelly, Liz Reeves-Ramos, and Nick LaJiness voted in favor of the ordinance, while Brett Rotermund, Tammie Wilson, Barbara Haney, and Mindy O’Neall voted against.

During the discussion, Crass argued that the ordinance allows for finding a balance between trusting their election system and verifying its results.

“It gives us a check so that we can see if there’s anything going haywire,” Crass said, adding that the borough is shining a light on its election process to increase the public trust.

“What it comes down to is trusting your friends and neighbors and the volunteers that make this system work,” he said.

Meanwhile, Rotermund said that while he didn’t distrust the Dominion Voting Machines, many did, and he recognized that.

“There is a large group of people in this borough, in the state, in the nation that don’t trust them,” he said, “and they’ve decided to drop out of the voting process. That, to me, is wrong, for whatever reason, it’s wrong.”

At a March 6 meeting of the Finance Committee, a renewal of the borough’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems to use their machines in the borough failed in a tie vote of 4-4.

Before the Assembly engaged in debate, members of the community spoke both in favor of and against the ordinance.

Those in favor voiced support for voting machines as a safe and effective tool for counting ballots, while those opposed expressed the view that these machines are not secure and are subject to result manipulation.

During her public testimony, community member Nancy Elliott said that while she appreciates Guttenberg’s attempt to find middle ground between machine counting and hand counting, she doesn’t feel like middle ground is really possible here.

“You either use the machines or you don’t,” she said, adding that her distrust of Dominion Voting Machines does not extend to election workers in Fairbanks. 00:04:52

While claiming that fraud from the machines has been proven in court, she asked the assembly why they had not taken up a prior offer from a community member to demonstrate how a voting machine could be hacked.

At the same time, community member and election worker Lori Neufeld spoke to the reliability of the Dominion voting machines as used by the borough, and said she supports the ordinance.

“It increases trust in our accuracy of our vote-counting machines by randomly selecting those two precincts out of the 32 precincts,” she said. “This ordinance, in my view, is a reasonable way of checking and auditing the Dominion voting tabulation machine.”

See a spelling or grammar error? Report it to web@ktuu.com

Copyright 2025 KTUU. All rights reserved.