Stop playing USPS roulette — except when we vote

A ballot drop box outside City Hall. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Independent)

By Angela Rodell

There’s a strange bit of cognitive dissonance sitting in Juneau mailboxes right now. Property tax bills went out this month with a banner across the top: “Stop playing USPS roulette and pay your CBJ Property Tax bill online!” The city, in other words, no longer trusts the mail to reliably get a check from a resident’s kitchen table to City Hall in time. It wants people to skip the postal system entirely.

And yet, when it comes to the single most important thing a local government asks its residents to do — vote — CBJ’s answer is the opposite. Voting here isn’t just mail-optional. It’s mail-only, mail-by-default, mail-as-the-whole-system. The city that warns you not to gamble on the post office for a tax payment asks you to trust that same post office with your ballot.

That contradiction is worth sitting with, not because vote by mail is a scandal, but because it deserves an honest second look, something Juneau hasn’t really had since the pandemic-era switch became permanent.

The logistics behind that trust are worth spelling out, because most residents never see them. Juneau’s ballots aren’t printed here. They’re produced by K&H Integrated Print Solutions in Everett, Washington, which uses a voter list supplied by the city clerk to print and mail every ballot north to Juneau. In 2025, the borough sent out 28,017 ballots that way. Only 10,263 came back, a return rate — a little over a third. The other roughly 17,750 never made the round trip. They sat unused before eventually being thrown out, adding to a municipal landfill, or, at best, going into the recycling bin.

The cost was never a surprise, either. When Juneau made vote by mail permanent, the city’s own projections said as much: ongoing costs were expected to run roughly $200,000 more per year than a conventional election on top of nearly $1 million spent to launch the system in 2020. Juneau didn’t stumble into a more expensive way of voting; it chose one, with the price tag spelled out in advance. In 2021, the Assembly went a step further and approved $700,000 to build a dedicated Ballot Processing Center off Thane Road, so ballots could be counted locally instead of flown to Anchorage for tabulation, as they had been in the two elections before that. That’s real money, committed in good faith to make the new system work better. But it raises an uncomfortable question: does having already built and paid for the infrastructure make the city less willing to reconsider the process that infrastructure was built to support? Sunk cost is a poor reason to keep doing something the expensive way. 

This fall, as the Assembly weighs budget gaps and possible tax increases, cutting the cost of running our own elections belongs on that list of things worth a hard look right alongside everything else on the table.

None of this means vote by mail is a bad idea. It’s worth being honest about what it actually gets right. For an elderly resident in the valley, a nurse working a double shift, a parent juggling two jobs and a school pickup schedule, or someone out commercial fishing, a ballot that arrives at the house and can be mailed back on your own time is a genuine, meaningful convenience. Turnout in CBJ elections has generally been healthier under vote by mail than it was under the old poll-based system, and that’s not nothing. Any honest conversation about changing the system has to start by acknowledging that trade-off, not pretending vote by mail is only a problem to be solved.

But convenience for the voter and soundness of the system aren’t the same question. Is a multi-week count, in an age when the city wants tax payments processed instantly online, really the best Juneau can do? Are there hybrid options, for example a return of some in-person voting centers alongside mail ballots, local printing, or an earlier count start, that would keep the accessibility voting by mail provides while trimming the cost, the fragility, and the wait?

If the city doesn’t trust the mail with a property tax check, it owes voters a real explanation of why the mail is nonetheless the right tool for elections or the willingness to look at doing it differently.

• Angela Rodell is a former CEO of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. and commissioner of the Alaska Department of Revenue who is currently a business consultant and member of Juneau International Airport’s board of directors. Her column appears the second Tuesday of every month.