U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski has earned Alaskans’ respect for her pragmatic independence, and her Feb. 23 Anchorage Daily News op-ed and recent floor remarks opposing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act merit a careful, nonpartisan reply.
She rightly affirms that only U.S. citizens should vote and that identification requirements make sense. The disagreement is narrower but consequential: She argues the bill’s documentary proof of citizenship rule creates unacceptable geographic and administrative burdens in a state like ours and that federalism alone should defeat it. As an economist who has spent four decades modeling public policy trade-offs in election systems, focusing on cost benefit analysis, administrative efficiency and incentive structures in remote jurisdictions, the SAVE Act appears not as a blunt federal hammer but as a targeted, fiscally rational correction that Alaska can implement without disenfranchising anyone.
[Related opinion: I support voter ID but oppose the SAVE America Act]
The senator’s Ketchikan to Juneau example is vivid and real. Our six regional Division of Elections offices do force travel in Southeast Alaska. A ferry or flight is no small matter when weather and fares add up. Yet the bill’s text is explicit: Proof must be presented “in person to the office of the appropriate election official.” That language is not a barrier. It is an open policy invitation for marginal cost outreach. Alaska’s division already flies staff to villages for audits, recounts and training. Reallocating a modest fraction of that existing travel budget to mobile citizenship verification stations is straightforward.
An election official at a Ketchikan harbor table, a tribal hall in Savoonga or a community center in Unalaska can accept a passport or certified birth certificate on the spot. The current deputy style registration officials would simply shift from form processors to logistical coordinators. From a public economics standpoint, this is classic principal agent realignment: Move verification upstream to the agent with statutory accountability rather than leaving it to undertrained DMV clerks or volunteers.
Sen. Murkowski cites the 80% to 90% of Alaska registrations that now occur by mail, online or through Permanent Fund dividend applications, warning that more than 25,000 voters would suddenly face new hurdles. Alaska’s population is roughly 730,000. Even if every registration required one-time compliance, the marginal administrative cost per voter, including travel subsidy, vital records assistance and mobile staff, is dwarfed by the long-run integrity benefit. The Division of Elections has documented dozens of noncitizen registration attempts in the past decade. Small in absolute terms, but each ineligible ballot imposes an externality that dilutes thousands of valid ones, including those from rural Alaska Native districts the senator champions.
In economic terms, this is a classic public goods problem: The honor system affirmation under current NVRA rules creates a free rider loophole that erodes the collective trust on which democratic participation rests. One study of similar verification regimes in Arizona from 2004 to 2020 showed noncitizen registration rates dropping to near zero with negligible turnout suppression among eligible citizens once mobile and same day options were in place. Alaska can replicate that outcome at far lower per capita cost than most states.
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The practical objections — $1,100 flights for a Savoonga teen, elders lacking certified birth certificates, women navigating name-change paperwork — are legitimate transaction costs, not constitutional violations. Same-day registration at the polls satisfies the in-person rule with no pretravel. Birth certificates and passports are durable, one-time investments. States routinely subsidize vital records access for low income and Native populations, and the Division of Elections could bundle mobile vital records vans with election teams at marginal cost. Marriage licenses and court orders for name changes are already handled daily at DMVs and borough offices. These are solvable frictions, not structural barriers. From a policy economics lens, the relevant comparison is not zero cost versus some cost, but the deadweight loss of unverifiable registration against the modest compliance burden. The SAVE Act wins that comparison.
On federalism, the senator is correct that elections are traditionally a state domain. Yet Congress already rewrote the rules in 1993 with the National Voter Registration Act, the statute the SAVE Act amends. Requiring documentary proof is not radical overreach. It is a precise fix to a federal statute that currently permits registration on an affirmation that empirical evidence shows is insufficient. Alaska already imposes stricter photo ID requirements at the polls than many states. Extending rigorous verification to the registration stage internalizes the externality of potential fraud in a system where the median voter and the median legislator place high value on election integrity. Public opinion data consistently show that 70% to 80% of Americans, including majorities of independents and minority voters, support citizenship proof for registration. Ignoring that preference imposes its own political economy cost: eroding confidence that depresses turnout more than any administrative hurdle.
Implementation will require resources and adaptation, but Alaska has absorbed unfunded mandates before, including REAL ID compliance, and emerged with modernized systems. Redirecting a portion of the Division of Elections’ outreach and PFD verification budget is not draconian. The alternative, leaving open pathways for ineligible registration, carries higher long term costs in lost public trust and potential litigation.
Sen. Murkowski and the author share the same objective function: accessible yet authentic elections that respect Alaska’s geography and demographics. The SAVE Act advances that objective by conditioning registration on verifiable citizenship while preserving same day polling place flexibility and empowering the state to meet voters where they live. It does not shutter community drives. It professionalizes them. It does not strand Ketchikan families or North Slope residents. It equips the Division of Elections to serve them more securely. As debate continues in the Senate, Alaskans deserve more than warnings of logistical difficulty. They deserve rigorous policy analysis that weighs real costs against real integrity gains. The SAVE Act passes that test. The burden now rests on Juneau, not Washington, to execute the logistics efficiently. In Alaska, scarce resources have always been managed with ingenuity. This is no exception.
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Economist Barbara Haney lives in North Pole.
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