Alaska

Alaska is the only state in this corpus with no county-level election administrator at all. The Division of Elections conducts every state election directly, and the 19 organized boroughs have no role in it. Roughly half the state by area is the Unorganized Borough, which has no local government whatsoever, so there is nothing beneath the state to devolve to. Every harvest design that starts from a list of county election offices, every contact model keyed to a county clerk, and every provenance chain that expects a county to be the publisher of record finds no such layer here.

Candidate contests are decided by ranked-choice tabulation after a nonpartisan top-four primary, first used on June 11, 2022. Judicial retentions and ballot measures on the same ballot are explicitly excluded and continue to run yes-or-no. A results parser that applies a single contest model to the ballot will either try to rank a retention question or flatten a ranked contest to a plurality, and both failures produce numbers that look plausible. The distinction is per-contest and it is stated by the Division rather than inferable from the results file shape.

The register carries Undeclared at 298,273 and Nonpartisan at 81,801 — separate codes, separate meanings, 63.1% of the state between them. Collapsing them into one bucket destroys a distinction the state maintains on purpose; treating either as a party invents an organisation that does not exist. The share is not uniform either: it runs from 57.4% in Eagle River to 73.6% in the northern and western districts, a sixteen-point spread that tracks geography rather than politics.

A recognized political party in Alaska needs 5,000 registered voters under AS 15.80.008; below that an organisation is a political group, tracked by the Division but not a party. The August register makes the line visible: the Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians clear it, and the other thirteen codes do not — the Prohibition Party holds 2 registrations statewide and The Future Generation Party holds 1. Party status is therefore a computed, changing property of the register rather than a fixed attribute, and a static party list goes stale the moment a group crosses or falls below the line.

Regional Educational Attendance Areas exist in the unorganized borough under AS 14.08.031(a), and because there is no local government to run their elections the Division of Elections does it. They are held annually on the first Tuesday in October — an odd-year and even-year election on a separate calendar from the August primary and November general, with its own candidate filing and its own runoffs. A calendar model with one or two elections per even year misses an entire annual statewide contest, and the school layer here never appears on a November ballot.

Registration is reported for 40 House districts and 402 precincts and for no other geography. There is no borough column, so any borough-level figure has to be built by aggregating precincts across a boundary the report does not draw. Precinct density is wildly uneven because the districts are: District 37 has 35 precincts for 9,864 voters and District 22 has 4 for 14,224 — 3.5 precincts per thousand voters against 0.3, a twelve-fold difference driven by distance rather than population.

Nineteen organized boroughs, fifteen counted as county governments by the Census, and the four-unit gap is exactly the consolidated city-boroughs — Anchorage, Juneau, Sitka and Wrangell. The rule holds on the count. But six boroughs carry unified names, and Skagway Municipality and Yakutat City and Borough are counted as county governments while identically-named Wrangell City and Borough is not. Deriving the excluded set from the name would be wrong for two of the six, which is the same failure as deriving a set of jurisdictions from a population threshold.

The Division publishes language assistance in Tagalog and in seven distinct varieties of Yup'ik and Cup'ik — Bristol Bay, Chevak, General Central, Hooper Bay, Nunivak, Norton Sound Kotlik and Yukon — each with its own program and its own materials. A language field with one value per major language cannot represent this, and collapsing the seven into Yup'ik erases the distinction the Voting Rights Act obligation is actually met at. These are not translations of convenience; they are the form in which the ballot is legally available.