Next year, Soldotna voters will cast ballots in November for local races, instead of October. That’s after city council members voted Wednesday to align its election day with the Kenai Peninsula Borough’s new election day.
Last month, nearly two-thirds of Kenai Peninsula voters supported aligning the borough’s election day with the state and federal election days. Proponents of the change say it could boost notoriously low turnout in municipal elections.
Since the borough collaborates with cities to run concurrent elections, those cities now need to decide whether to adopt the same change or run them independently. Soldotna Mayor Paul Whitney told the council a majority of Soldotna city voters favored a move to November.
“This is to put us in line with what the borough is doing now on their elections,” he said. “The results of that election show that the borough overwhelmingly wanted to change it – borough residents and city residents. The majority of the city residents also wanted to change the election date.”
City Council member Jordan Chilson sponsored the proposal with Whitney. He says keeping the two days aligned will minimize voter confusion.
“I believe it’s pretty well established that our community has an expectation at this point given the way that our elections have historically been run that they can come and they can vote for their municipal elections on the same date,” he said.
Soldotna isn’t the only municipality grappling with whether to move their election day to match the borough. Kenai City Council members are holding a work session to discuss how they want to move forward.
Last month’s election was only the latest time the assembly considered aligning election days. Assembly members thought about, but decided against, putting an advisory question on the ballot in 2023. At that time, multiple cities spoke out against the proposed change, including Soldotna.
Among the concerns raised was the cost to cities of buying their own voting machines if they didn’t realign elections with the new borough date. Cities also said it could be difficult to find enough election workers to staff simultaneous state and local elections. Instead, cities asked for more time to collaborate with the borough and for a working group to study local voter turnout.
