Alaska voters have overwhelmingly rejected calling a state constitutional convention.<\/p>\n
The question of whether to call a convention appears on the ballot every 10 years. It has in the past been defeated in lopsided votes and gotten little attention.<\/p>\n
But supporters of a convention saw an opening this year amid public frustration with the years-long legislative fights over what size the annual check paid to residents from Alaska’s oil-wealth fund should be. Some hoped a convention would be the place to advocate for abortion restrictions or changes in how Alaska judges are picked, proposed changes they’ve been unable to advance in the state Legislature.<\/p>\n
Convention supporters argued there is no harm in calling a convention because any proposed changes would have to go to voters for approval. But convention opponents said calling a convention was unnecessary and risky and that there is a more targeted way to seek changes to the state constitution – with two-thirds support in each the House and Senate and a vote of the people.<\/p>\n
One opposition group, Defend Our Constitution, reported raising more than $4.5 million in its bid to defeat the measure.<\/p>\n
Had it passed, the Alaska ballot question would have led to the first constitutional convention in the state since the original convention in the 1950s.<\/p>\n
Voters in Missouri and New Hampshire also rejected calling a constitutional convention in their respective states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AP calls it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":92917,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-92916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92916","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\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92916"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=92916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}