Politics

Big early vote as runoff campaign concludes with election Tuesday

Elections officials reported record-breaking early voting numbers Monday in the Anchorage mayoral runoff between Amy Demboski and Ethan Berkowitz that has rapidly taken turns both bruising and bizarre.

A day before polls were to open Tuesday, people were still lining up at early voting stations to cast in-person "absentee" ballots. Since early voting started April 22, more than 11,100 people have cast votes -- far surpassing the record set only last month in the April 7 municipal election, said deputy municipal clerk Amanda Moser. The runoff is a result of that election, since no candidate received the 45 percent minimum of votes required to win outright.

"It's huge," Moser said of the early turnout.

The clerk's office has made a concerted effort to boost early voting numbers since 2013. What was once "election day," when everyone but a handful of vacationers or deployed service members went to the polls, is now more like the last day to vote.

Local polling places will be open as usual Tuesday from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. Find your polling place by visiting the Alaska Division of Elections website or calling 269-8683. An app on the municipality's website offers an interactive polling place locator.

Absentee in-person voting will still be available on election day at the University of Alaska Anchorage Student Union, Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport and Loussac Library. Voters from any part of town can get a ballot at those locations, election officials said.

Voters cast about 8,450 early votes in the April 7 election, the previous record, Moser said. A total of 57,536 people voted in the election.

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In the 2009 runoff between Dan Sullivan and Eric Croft, 7,333 people cast votes early, Moser said.

Even as lines of people waited to cast their absentee ballots late Monday, conservative talk-radio host Bernadette Wilson released the recording of a now-infamous exchange about same-sex marriage featuring Berkowitz, her former co-host.

The radio station's archive of the show was no longer available but a listener provided a copy, Toben Shelby, a KFQD producer, said in an email, and the station posted it on its website.

The recording showed the conversation between the two hosts started as a legal debate on the same-sex marriage issue in the appellate courts, with Berkowitz taking a libertarian position that consenting adults should be allowed to choose their own relationships. An unidentified caller took the issue further, asking Berkowitz whether a father and son "should be allowed to marry if they're both consenting adults."

"If you're defining marriage as the bundle of rights and privileges that now accrue to people, yes," Berkowitz said. In the show, he explained he was talking about financial and property rights, not incest, and on Monday, after the recording aired, said he had found himself "frustrated" within a "constrained hypothetical conversation."

Over the past week, the focus of the mayoral campaign shifted from municipal budgets and public safety to Berkowitz's comments on the talk-radio show.

One of the first references to the comments came in a sermon from a local Christian leader, Jerry Prevo. But on another talk-radio broadcast last week, Demboski was offered the chance to denounce the suggestion that Berkowitz supported incest, and she wouldn't. Instead, she said she would be "interested to hear" a recording of his comments.

Berkowitz said over the weekend the comments amounted to an "an obscene accusation."

As the dustup was still playing out, former mayoral candidate Andrew Halcro posted on Facebook late Sunday that he was urging his supporters to vote for Berkowitz.

Halcro initially said he would not endorse either of the runoff candidates. But Halcro encouraged his supporters to vote for Berkowitz, saying he was worried about Demboski's honesty, integrity and maturity, "and her decision to allow the most extreme elements of the Republican Party to lead her campaign."

A spokesman for Demboski declined to comment on the endorsement.

Halcro said in a phone interview Monday morning that he became frustrated at the direction of the campaign.

"After the last week, it was like, 'I'm sorry, I can't bite my tongue anymore,'" Halcro said. "To watch this campaign degrade over the last two weeks into this personal attack at Ethan was just way too much."

"At any point in time, Amy could have stopped this," Halcro added.

Halcro also cited what he called an "egregious" recent Facebook post by a Christian conservative group, Alaska Family Action, that has supported Demboski and her opposition to a potential city law barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

The Facebook post, which was removed Monday morning after being live for about 12 hours, referenced the candidates' positions on same-sex marriage. It used a Holocaust-era photo of a destroyed Jewish business in pre-war Austria to illustrate its argument that moral issues are inherently tied to fiscal matters.

Alaska Family Action's president, Jim Minnery, said in a phone interview Monday that the post had been made by someone else, whom he wouldn't identify. He added that the post was "wrong" and "crossed the line," and was not connected to Berkowitz being Jewish.

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"But the secondary message is, there's very much an equivalency to what happened in the early 1940s, with the church being silenced and pressured by the government -- which is happening today," Minnery added. Today, churches are being similarly pressured over their advocacy on social issues, Minnery said.

"There is an equivalency in terms of silencing the church," Minnery said. "It's not an equivalency whatsoever in the heinous acts of the concentration camps -- that's missing the point and that's hyperbole."

Asked about the Facebook post, a spokeswoman for Berkowitz, Nora Morse, said in a prepared statement that it was "done in particularly poor taste."

"Unfortunately, this is yet another example of a desperate campaign trying to divide our community," Morse's statement said.

The fourth major mayoral candidate in last month's balloting, Dan Coffey, hasn't endorsed a candidate in the runoff, and he couldn't be reached Monday. But he was critical of Demboski last week in an interview, saying she "knows very little about anything at all."

That prompted a response from Demboski's campaign, which quoted her as saying that Coffey, in a recent phone conversation, had asked her for a job in her administration.

Berkowitz is backed by numerous state and local unions, including the Anchorage Police Department Employees Association and the International Association of Firefighters Local 1264. A Republican state senator from Anchorage, Lesil McGuire, recently recorded a radio advertisement supporting Berkowitz.

Demboski's endorsements include U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, current Mayor Dan Sullivan and former U.S. Senate candidates Joe Miller and Mead Treadwell. Groups that include the Anchorage Tea Party and the Alaska Republican Assembly have endorsed the candidate.

Devin Kelly

Devin Kelly was an ADN staff reporter.

Nathaniel Herz

Anchorage-based independent journalist Nathaniel Herz has been a reporter in Alaska for nearly a decade, with stints at the Anchorage Daily News and Alaska Public Media. Read his newsletter, Northern Journal, at natherz.substack.com

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