My last act before departing North America to come back to Korea last month was to vote in Alaska’s primary election. Even though I was late for my plane, I ran through the cold rain to the voting station minutes before it closed to submit my absentee ballot. A week later, when voting day in the U.S. finally rolled around, I set my alarm in Korea early so I could go to the Internet to check the Alaska election results. Out of the only 27.5 percent of my eligible compatriots who bothered to submit a primary ballot, 9.7 percent had elected the candidate whose name will appear on the general election ballot as the Republican Party nominee for Alaska’s open seat in the United States Senate. Because Alaskans these days tend to elect Republican candidates, the man currently favored to take the seat will have been chosen by less than 10 percent of the eligible voters of the state.



In my hometown, the capital city of Alaska, voter turnout, at 40 percent, was much higher than the rate statewide; still, only 757 people in that city of 30,000 voted for the winner. Regardless of the low level of participation (and immense monetary contributions from outside the state, notably from the hard right quasi―anarchist “Tea Party”), no one disputes that the victorious candidate won his primary race fair and square―democratically.

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