{"id":30612,"date":"2016-01-26T20:05:42","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T04:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/alaska-democrats-vote-to-allow-independents-in-party-primary\/"},"modified":"2016-01-26T20:05:42","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T04:05:42","slug":"alaska-democrats-vote-to-allow-independents-in-party-primary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/alaska-democrats-vote-to-allow-independents-in-party-primary\/","title":{"rendered":"Alaska Democrats vote to allow independents in party primary"},"content":{"rendered":"

JUNEAU \u2014<\/strong> Alaska Democratic party leaders have approved allowing candidates not affiliated with a political party to run in the Democratic primary.<\/p>\n

Unaffiliated candidates currently can run for office by petition and gathering signatures. In a release, state party chair Casey Steinau said Democrats want their party to be as inclusive as possible. This also would give voters more choices in the primary, she said.<\/p>\n

Party spokesman Jake Hamburg said the party will ask the state Division of Elections to implement the change for this year\u2019s elections. He said it would be a pilot program because party bylaws must be approved every two years and this is year two of a two-year cycle.<\/p>\n

A message was left Tuesday with the director of the Division of Elections.<\/p>\n

The Democratic party\u2019s central committee approved the change during a weekend meeting.<\/p>\n

Currently, only one of the state\u2019s legislators, Rep. Dan Ortiz of Ketchikan, is unaffiliated with a party. He caucuses with minority House Democrats.<\/p>\n

In 2014, when he was running for governor, Bill Walker changed his party affiliation from Republican to undeclared in joining forces with Democrat Byron Mallott. Mallott abandoned his own gubernatorial bid to be Walker\u2019s running mate. The ticket was supported by the Democratic party. Walker and Mallott won.<\/p>\n

Unaffiliated candidates \u2014 those identified as undeclared or nonpartisan \u2014 comprise the largest voting bloc in the state. Alaska\u2019s Republican party has nearly twice the number of registered voters as Democrats, according to Division of Elections statistics.<\/p>\n

The Democrats say that it\u2019s been with support from independents that Democrats have won elections.<\/p>\n

Hamburg said there are independents who share the party\u2019s values but don\u2019t necessarily want to check a box identifying themselves as Democrats. The proposed change would allow independents to run in a Democratic primary while retaining their status as unaffiliated, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JUNEAU \u2014 Alaska Democratic party leaders have approved allowing candidates not affiliated with a political party to run in the Democratic primary. Unaffiliated candidates currently can run for office by petition and gathering signatures. In a release, state party chair Casey Steinau said Democrats want their party to be as inclusive as possible. This also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-30612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30612"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=30612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}