These are some of the reasons we are not going to rank Rep. Sarah Vance in the general election for House District 6:
In February, at a meeting with House tribal affairs, Sarah was listening to testimony from people working in organizations serving Alaska Native people on the disparities in assault rates and violence against Indigenous women, which is much higher than the general population.
At one point, she said, “What I hear in this committee is that Alaska Native women feel that it’s exclusive to your experience.” She told a member of the group that testified, “but I asked that, when you come and present, that you remember that you have white sisters who are going through the same thing.”
A week later, on the House floor, she apologized for her insensitive comments. Comments like these show her lack of empathy and understanding of this egregious affront to the Native population.
In March, she voted to not override Dunleavy’s veto of Senate Bill 140, which failed by one vote. S.B. 140 would have permanently increased the state’s per-student public school funding formula. We know that Homer High, other schools in the peninsula, and many parents and students asked her to support the bill. Public schools have not been adequately funded since 2017, and she voted no.
One of the reasons given for not funding public schools is because of low test scores. How can we raise scores without forward funding? We support funding public education, but it seems Sarah Vance does not.
In May, there was a vote to proclaim Juneteenth as a holiday. The holiday commemorates when the last enslaved people in the Confederacy learned they were free. She was one of three representatives who voted no. It passed 37-3. The governor signed this bill into law in June. This holiday is also referred to as Emancipation Day or Freedom Day. You would think after marginalizing Natives, she would be more sensitive to other minorities.
Sarah sponsored H.B. 129 this year, a bill to remove voters from the voter rolls who haven’t voted after two years. The current law is four years. The bill moved to the Senate after it passed out of the House 33-6. However, the Senate added items that would have allowed for absentee ballots to be double checked for mistakes, eliminate witness signatures, and allow for voters to register within 30 days of elections; these are all pro-voting measures. She ended up not supporting the bill because of these additions.
Furthermore, having Sarah sponsor any bill dealing with elections seems disingenuous. Sarah showed the film “2000 Mules” in Homer, a movie that made a feeble attempt to show that the 2020 election was stolen through harvesting votes. This year, the groups behind this film came out and explained that they had no evidence to back it up, and the media group that sponsored the film removed it from their platforms.
We do not want to vote for someone who feels that Native women and white women have similar situations, someone who thinks Black people don’t deserve a holiday recognizing their freedom, or someone who thinks the schools should try each year to figure out how to make their budgets work at the very last second. Furthermore, we don’t want to vote for someone who promotes the idea that the 2020 election was stolen.
We will rank the other two candidates (Dawson Slaughter and Brent Johnson) but not Sarah Vance with her extremist agenda.
Cindy and Alex Koplin are longtime residents of Homer.