Skagway’s city hall and museum. (Greta Mart)
The deadline to file as a candidate on Skagway’s general election ballot has ended. No more candidates will appear on the ballot, however, there is still the opportunity for write-in candidates to run.
Two seats on the Skagway School Board are up for election as well as two seats on the borough assembly.
School Board President John Hischer will seek re-election this October. Jay Burnham, Steve Burnham Jr., and Roger Griffin have put their names in for Assembly.
Last year, five people ran for assembly as write-in candidates. David Brena won a seat on a write-in campaign and Henry won the other available seat. Mayor Monica Carlson also successfully ran as a write-in candidate last year.
In June, the assembly voted to amend municipal rules for counting write-in votes. Skagway Borough Clerk Emily Deach explained that the old rules were written in a way that could have prevented legitimate write-in votes from being counted. This could have caused problems last year since there were not enough candidates on the ballot to fill the open assembly seats.
“Under our old code, there could have been a situation where the total amount of write-in ballots would not have reached the threshold to where we would be allowed to count them even though we only had one person on the ballot for two seats. So, we identified that issue, and it didn’t happen, but we said we need to fix this before this next election, which we did,” Deach said.
Now municipal code allows all votes for write-in candidates to be counted as long as they have properly declared their candidacy.
“The only way that we would count write-in votes is if we have a letter of intent on file from a write-in candidate. If a person does not file the letter of intent as a write-in by the deadline, we would not count any of the write-in votes,” Deach said.
Those who wish to run as a write-in candidate must submit a letter of intent to the borough clerk no later than 5:00 p.m. on Friday, September 28. Along with the letter of intent, the candidate must also file a Public Official’s Financial Disclosure Statement.
