Voting to Open Soon in CEA and GVEA Board Elections

Published on April 30, 2025

By Brian Kassof

            Voting opens today in the CEA board election. CEA members will elect one director and vote on whether to approve a proposed change to the cooperative’s Bylaws. The CEA election runs through its Annual Meeting on May 30. GVEA members will also elect one director, for District 6 (the area around Delta Junction). Voting will open on May 9 and run through June 10.

CEA:

            CEA members will elect one director this year for a four-year term. Members can vote one of three ways—electronically, by mail, or at the CEA Annual Meeting. Members are being sent an email with electronic voting instructions from noreplay@directvote.net on April 30. Those who do not receive the email should contact the election administrator or CEA customer service. Online voting closing at 1 p.m. on May 30. As in past years, CEA members wishing to vote by mail need to call the election administrator (866-909-3549) and request a paper ballot. Paper ballots must be received by the election administrator, located in Minnesota, by noon on May 29 to be counted. Members will also have the opportunity to vote at the CEA Annual Meeting at ChangePoint Alaska on May 30—voting opens at 3 p.m. To encourage early voting, each Friday in May CEA will award prizes to members who vote electronically.

            There are three candidates running for the one open seat on the CEA Board—Katherine Jernstrom, Bernie Smith, and Aaric St Michel. Jernstrom and Smith were nominated by the CEA Nomination Committee, while St Michel got on the ballot through the petition process. The Nominating Committee had put forward one additional candidate, former board member Sam Cason, but he withdrew from the race. The current holder of the seat, Bettina Chastain, is not running for reelection. AETP has sent these candidates its questionnaire and will publish their responses as they are received.

            CEA members are also being asked to approve a change to the cooperative’s Bylaws. The proposed change would extend the window in which the CEA annual meeting can be held from one month to two months. Currently, the annual meeting must occur between May 15 and June 15. Under the proposed change, it could be scheduled between April 15 and June 15. The purpose of the change, according to the ballot language, is to give the Board greater flexibility in scheduling future annual meetings.

            More information about the candidates and the proposed bylaw change can be found on the CEA Annual Meeting and Election page.

GVEA:

GVEA members in District 6 will elect a board member this year for a three-year term. Members can vote in two ways—electronically or by mail. Election packets with paper ballots will be mailed on May 9 to GVEA members in District 6, and online voting will open the same day. This year, for the first time, members voting electronically can cast their vote through their MyGVEA account. Members without a MyGVEA account can also vote online, but they will need to contact GVEA for a password—instructions on voting can be found here. Online voting will close at 5 p.m. on June 10; this is also the deadline for receiving mailed ballots.

In District 6, incumbent Fred Sheen is facing John Sloan—Sloan had previously held this seat, but chose not to run for reelection in 2022. GVEA was scheduled to hold an election in District 5 (the North Pole area) this year, but there was only one candidate, Bradley Swoope, in that race. At its March 25 meeting, the GVEA Board exercised its power to cancel the District 5 race and appoint Swoope to the seat, effective June 24. The current director in District 5, Chris Bunch, chose not to run for reelection. AETP has sent the District 6 candidates its questionnaire and will publish responses as they are received. For more information on voting and the candidates, see the GVEA election page.

            The cancellation of the District 5 race continues a trend for GVEA, which has had difficulty finding candidates to run in its board races. Since 2022, it has cancelled five of nine possible races because there was only a single candidate. In such circumstances, GVEA’s Board usually cancels the race and names the unopposed candidate to the seat—this practice was codified last year by a change to the cooperative’s Bylaws. According to GVEA staff, this saves members about $25,000 per race.

            This year, the nominating committees in both District 5 and 6 made use of another change to GVEA’s Bylaws approved last year. (GVEA has separate nominating committees for each of its seven districts). Under the previous rules, nominating committees had to advance at least two candidates to the ballot or they could not advance any. This meant that unopposed candidates were required to reapply to get on the ballot through GVEA’s petition process. The bylaws’ change allows nominating committees to advance a single candidate, something that the committees in both District 5 and District 6 did.

 In a recent blog post, the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition (FCAC) wrote that there had been at least one other, seemingly qualified applicant in District 6 who the Nominating Committee decided not to advance to the ballot. AETP has heard similar information from other sources. (The second candidate in District 6, Sloan, got on the ballot through the petition process—it is not known if he also had applied to the Nominating Committee.) Since the work of these committees is not public, it is not known how many applicants were refused or for what reasons. GVEA’s Board has not discussed this situation publicly, and the utility did not respond to a request for comment. AETP will report more on this story if further information becomes available.