The Silent Suppression: When Not Voting Becomes a Choice
Jun 08, 2024
Kelly Tshibaka and Niki Tshibaka
In this segment STAND, our hosts discuss the recent mayoral election in Anchorage, Alaska, where the far-left candidate won amidst record low voter turnout. They examine the reasons behind the low turnout, citing a poll that revealed various factors such as lack of trust in election integrity, concerns about ranked choice voting, and the impact of the Dobbs decision. Kelly and Niki emphasize the importance of mobilizing the vote and ensuring that every vote matters to avoid forfeiting races.
In this segment STAND, our hosts discuss the recent mayoral election in Anchorage, Alaska, where the far-left candidate won amidst record low voter turnout. They examine the reasons behind the low turnout, citing a poll that revealed various factors such as lack of trust in election integrity, concerns about ranked choice voting, and the impact of the Dobbs decision. Kelly and Niki emphasize the importance of mobilizing the vote and ensuring that every vote matters to avoid forfeiting races.
Welcome back to Stand with Kelly and Niki Tshibaka. Niki Tshibaka, let's talk about voter turnout in elections. So recently we had an election here in Anchorage for the mayor race. I want to set it up for all of our viewers who might not know the details. We have an incumbent mayor who is a Republican. He was elected several years ago in the middle of the covid crisis, because our very left, far left assembly had just gone too far and had implemented mask mandates and school shutdowns and business shutdowns and city shutdowns. And anchorage responded and said no more shutdowns and the most conservative candidate in a very flooded field of mayoral candidates was elected, and so he's been our incumbent the last three years. Now he has had to deal with a legislature that has a super majority and veto override power that is far left. So that's kind of been the balance in Anchorage. So we just had another election and in this particular election the far left candidate won, so the challenger won, so now we've just gone completely blue as a city. And of course, anchorage is the largest city in Alaska and this is a very interesting case study for the rest of the country, because there is a great effort, of course, to turn the West Coast into the left coast, and Alaska remains the only red-ish state on the West Coast, and so we are standing on the front edge of the tide there trying to keep everything from the whole West Coast from turning left.
Kelly Tshibaka:
But what really happened in this situation, I think, was a case study in voter turnout. Why didn't the voters come out to vote? I don't believe that Anchorage is actually more Democrat than Republican. I do think that we are pretty on the fence, but there are still more right-leaning voters and there are left-leaning voters. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had the result that we had during the COVID pandemic for this mayor race. So what happened here In this particular situation?
Kelly Tshibaka:
In this runoff race, because neither of them got enough votes to actually win, so it went to a runoff we had a 12% lower turnout than in the runoff race that this mayor had three years ago, so we had a significant voter drop-off than the last mayoral runoff race. I think that that's really telling for 2024. And interesting for people who are looking at the 2024 November race and what that could mean. We also had record low voter turnout in Alaska for the November 2022 race. So we are having a voter drop off problem in Alaska and we're all very concerned about voter suppression, I think across the United States and in various forms. One of the ways that I think votes can get suppressed is by people choosing to not exercise their vote. Just choosing to not vote is a form of suppressing the vote. When the election is actually chosen by a very, very small minority of people making huge decisions for everybody else, that is a form of voter suppression.
Niki Tshibaka:
Because the reasons those people are choosing not to vote is because, you know, fill in the blank, they don't feel like their vote counts, they don't trust the system anymore, you know, et cetera.
Kelly Tshibaka:
So interesting that you would mention that After the 2022 election, we did a poll and this is what we found for people who didn't vote. So interesting things to consider for people. 73% of the people. This is statewide in Alaska, but still bears important information for everybody, I think across the nation. 73% of the people who answered this poll did not vote Absolutely verified. Here are some of the things the people who answered this poll did not vote absolutely verified. Here are some of the things that people said in this poll 19.3% of them did not vote because they lacked trust in the integrity of the elections or they were concerned about rank choice voting in Alaska, which is a unique system that we have up here. Interestingly, that was split evenly between people registered as Republicans and Democrats that didn't lean one way or the other.
Niki Tshibaka:
That's a huge find.
Kelly Tshibaka:
Yeah, that was interesting to us. 55% said that ranked choice voting was more complex and affected their vote. 34% said the Dobbs decision that happened in 2022 affected their decision whether or not to vote.
Niki Tshibaka:
The Dobbs decision being the reversal of Roe v Wade.
Kelly Tshibaka:
The decision to put Roe v Wade down to the from federal decision to the state, so every state gets to make its own decision about implementing Roe v Wade. So we know that these large policy decisions across the United States actually do have an impact on whether people decide to vote or not. Like some, one of the things that we saw for my race is 5,000 right-leaning voters whose single issue that they vote on is pro-life issues. They did not vote, and they're super voters. They did not vote in 2022. And potentially, the reason is because they figured. Well, the issue is over. We got Roe v Wade overturned. In fact, roe v Wade's not overturned. Here in Alaska, you can abort a baby all the way up to it being delivered on the delivery table, and so Roe v Wade is alive and active in Alaska.
Kelly Tshibaka:
However, these 5,000 pro-life voters did not vote, and so they said the Dobbs decision affected their decision whether to vote. Fifty five percent or sorry, 34 percent. Twenty eight percent said their frustration about Alaska election systems affected their decision to vote, and 22 percent said negative media coverage affected their decision to vote. So, to your point, there are all kinds of reasons why people might decide to not vote, but these are some of the things that I know are affecting our significant voter drop off in Alaska, that people are still scratching their heads about, trying to figure out how to get people to vote, and it absolutely affected our outcome in 2022.
Kelly Tshibaka:
It definitely affected the outcome of this mayor race because, by all accounts, the incumbent had the advantage in this race and has more of a base in this race and could have been able to win had the voter turnout been there. And I am concerned the reason I'm bringing this up I'm concerned that, without planning, if we just think well, people are donating to Trump, people are donating to congressional candidates, there's a lot of passion on social media, but if we don't do the hard work of mobilizing the vote and making clear your vote matters, every vote matters, then we will actually forfeit races. And then there goes the entire point of doing all the work that we're doing.
Niki Tshibaka:
Yeah, absolutely. The work is important, but ultimately it's sealed by our vote.
Kelly Tshibaka:
Absolutely.
Niki Tshibaka:
And by the additional votes that we get for the things that we're passionate about and the causes that we're passionate about, I think I can speak for both of us.
Niki Tshibaka:
We don't want to see voter suppression on either side Right it's. It's as concerning to me to see that there was a drop off in people voting on the Democrat side as it was on the Republican side, because I know this is probably not popular to say in these days, but we need to have a system with more than just one party rule. That's how we balance things out. It's another form of balancing political power and making sure that different ideas are considered and the best ideas rise to the service and the candidates with the best ideas rise to the service. We don't want a one-party system. We have a one-party system here in Anchorage and that is not a good thing. And we don't want a one-party system to happen at the federal level, because we've seen what's happened when the Biden administration and the leftists who control it have had essentially unfettered authority and power to do whatever they wanted. I mean they've been pretty brazen in completely ignoring the Constitution on so many issues.
Kelly Tshibaka:
Absolutely.
Niki Tshibaka:
And, unfortunately, the folks in power in our city not right now, but who are coming into power I'm concerned we're going to be seeing some more violations of people's constitutional rights, like we saw with COVID. They did not hesitate to violate people's constitutional rights and their ability to just live to survive. We had one restaurant here in town that got fines from the city.
Kelly Tshibaka:
The exorbitant fines.
Niki Tshibaka:
Because they were refusing to shut down because, guess what? People still needed to eat and people still needed to live. Their businesses still needed to. The businesses were their sole source of income. Right, and now we know, after all of that, that these draconian lockdowns were unnecessary and incredibly destructive. And I would say at the end of the day not to get totally off topic, but this is what happens when you don't have voices listening to each other in a balanced dialogue on these things. Have voices listening to each other and a balanced dialogue on these things. It was pretty clear to many of us that these policy decisions weren't only unconstitutional and violating people's constitutional rights, they weren't going to get the you know, purported results, and so this is why we want to have people on both sides voting and people engaged in a positive way, not in a destructive way. In a positive way, so that we can get back to the regular order of business here in America.
Kelly Tshibaka:
I would also add as someone who has reviewed the election system in Alaska. So there's not a lot of people who can go around saying they've done an auditor review of a statewide election system. The concerns about election integrity are understandable, but we can't wait for an election system to be pure and flawless before we vote. I think every election system is going to have some issues with it, because every election system has humans at the root of it, and so we need to shore up and build some protections and guards around the election system as much as we can. But we don't say I'm not going to participate or not vote because there might be some flaws or vulnerabilities around a system. That's just. You know what? If you said that about your bank, you're just not going to do any banking transactions because there could be some vulnerabilities, and instead we need to participate and to vote. And also what I've seen is that a lot of these vulnerabilities can absolutely be if you will overridden or snowed over by voter turnout. A light turnout makes it a lot easier for bumps in the system to be felt and to be noticed in an election, but a huge turnout makes it much, much harder for people to mess with or for errors in the system to come to the surface and actually affect the outcome of an election, and so, really, I think one of the antidotes until you get to the kind of system where you have a lot of confidence and trust in it one of the antidotes to it is voter turnout. So if you're one of the people who's like I don't trust the system, good, go vote. That's exactly what you need to do, because your vote is part of what insulates the system from its vulnerabilities. It's just my two cents there.
Kelly Tshibaka:
You're on stand with Kelly and Niki Tshibaka. We appreciate our standouts. Make sure to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform on YouTube and follow us on social media. You can find all of that at standshoworg Niki Tshibaka. That's also where our friends can get the tickets to the Alan Dershowitz event that we will be having in Anchorage on June 27th. Come hear him live talk about the fight for freedom in Israel and America and his firsthand account at the Trump trial. We'll see you there, stanshoworg. See you next time, where courage is contagious.