The state of Alaska has
charged 10 Whittier residents with voter misconduct, asserting in a series of indictments filed April 3 that they voted illegally in a variety of recent elections because they were born in American Samoa and thus are American nationals and not citizens.
Under state law, only American citizens may vote in Alaska.
Those 10 new cases follow an 11th,
opened in 2023, that
has caused a legal debate in the Alaska Court of Appeals about whether someone must have the intent to deceive elections officials in order to be convicted for elections misconduct after incorrectly registering to vote.
That first case involves a Whittier resident named Tupe Smith who ran for a local school board seat and won, only to be prosecuted after elections officials learned that she was born in American Samoa and was not a U.S. citizen. American Samoa is the only U.S. territory whose residents Congress has not recognized as having birthright U.S. citizenship.
“These are actually the first criminal prosecutions that we’re aware of, based simply upon the fact that someone was born in American Samoa,” said attorney Neil Weare of
Right to Democracy, a national group that is defending Smith in court.
“Had any of these individuals been born in Alaska, or Guam or Hawaii, Alaska would not be prosecuting them,” he said.
Smith’s attorney sought to have her case dismissed in 2024, on the grounds that Smith didn’t intend to deceive officials and believed that as an American national, she had the ability to run for office and vote in local elections.
A lower-court judge ruled partially in Smith’s favor, and her attorneys sought an interlocutory appeal, asking the Alaska Court of Appeals to rule on the issue before her case is finished.
Typically, the appeals court asks appellants to wait until their case is finished, but in this instance, it accepted the appeal. Oral arguments are expected later this year.
Weare said he believes Smith’s case and the new cases have a great deal in common.
According to the affidavits accompanying the new charging documents, the Division of Elections “received an anonymous complaint that alleged that ‘a large family group, many of whom were not U.S. Citizens,’ had also registered to vote and had voted in a recent election.”
That complaint came from someone who was familiar with the Smith case and the investigation that led to charges against her.
The division forwarded the new complaint to the Alaska Bureau of Investigation, a part of the Alaska State Troopers.
The troopers investigated and visited Whittier in September “to interview … individuals who had registered to vote and had voted in a recent prior election but who were either not U.S. Citizens or whose citizenship status was unclear.”
Preliminary court dates have been set for the 10 accused people, who face a variety of felony and misdemeanor charges.
“Everyone who is eligible to vote and properly registered to vote is encouraged to vote. Voting is a right of citizenship. It is how our leaders are selected and how everyday citizens get to influence policy on a local, state, and national level. To be clear, you must be a citizen to vote in Alaska in any election — federal, state, or local,” said Alaska Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore, in a statement announcing the charges against the 10 people.
Since President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Republican politicians — including Trump himself — have claimed that fraud caused Trump’s loss.
In Alaska and elsewhere,
no evidence has been found to uphold that idea.
The 10 charges filed last week more than double the total number of voter-fraud-related cases related to Alaska since the 2020 election.
Even these new cases, Weare argues, are on shaky legal ground.
A U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of American Samoans seeking recognition of citizenship in a case that was later
overruled by an appeals court in 2021. But in a separate case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has
questioned the soundness of a legal precedent that helped underpin the appellate ruling.
Weare said he intends to argue that under the 14th Amendment, people who are born in American Samoa have a right to U.S. citizenship.
“The Constitution guarantees them that right,” he said. “So that’s a question that will come out over the course of this case: Can the state of Alaska, in fact, prove that these people born on U.S. soil, who owe permanent allegiance to the United States, who have a U.S. passport, are not U.S. citizens? And we don’t think they’ll be able to do that.”
