907Honest

Politics, Business, Technology, Food, and History in Alaska, Arctic, PNW & Hawaii,

[907Honest @907Honest]

Dear Alaska,

I have spent years fighting a fight most of you never asked me to take on, and most of you never even knew I was fighting.

I did it anyway.

When ranked-choice voting arrived here, it did not arrive as a neighbor’s idea. It arrived with money, branding, and a machine behind it. Arabella Advisors and the network around them poured resources into changing how Alaskans vote. I took that fight personally. I took it on your behalf, often without your knowledge, because I believed someone had to. I believed our elections should still mean what ordinary people think they mean: you pick the person you want, the person with the most votes wins, and the count is something a citizen can follow without a software manual.

I did not only argue against ranked-choice voting. I tried to teach it. I made videos. Animated videos. Short-form videos. I covered the micro and the macro — how a single ballot can be exhausted, how a first-choice can disappear, how a “majority” can be manufactured from the last candidates standing. I debated 3 Oregon Legislators, 3 Alaska Legislators, U.S. Presidential Candidate Chase Oliver, and Steve Chessin (Father of RCV in Oakland and San Fransisco).

I presented at multiple GOP conventions. I sat on Zoom calls. I made phone calls until my voice was gone. I wrote books and made two of them free on the Smithsonian Internet Archive so no one would have to buy my argument. If you wanted the source material, it was there.

I took the fight out of Alaska too. I traveled. I tried to help other states see what we were living through before the same model spread further. We have cost the RCV Lobby $150 million in the West Coast just in 2024. They tried in 6+ states and failed in each.

Here at home I became, for better or worse, the person who would not let the cost conversation die. I documented what this system has actually cost Alaska. I studied turnout and concluded that ranked-choice voting helped produce some of the weakest participation we have seen (Lowest Turnout in History of Alaska, while simultaneously being 328% more expensive). Many of the 19 states that have banned Ranked Choice Voting, used the crazy expenses in Alaska as reasons to ban, those costs were first reported by my work.

I even went further than I probably should have. In my office, on a computer I built from scratch, I reverse-engineered Dominion’s ranked-choice tabulation software so I would not have to take anyone’s word for what the machine was doing. I am not asking you to make me a hero for that. I am telling you why I am tired, and why I am still here. No one I have met has gone as far into this system as I have. That is not a boast. It is a confession. I have given this chapter of my life to a voting method most Alaskans never asked for.

I am asking you now, plainly:

Vote Yes on Ballot Measure 2 this November.

Vote to repeal ranked-choice voting. Vote to return to simple, honest elections where the candidate with the most votes wins. If you do that, I can close this chapter as a success — not as a personal trophy, but as a debt paid back to the state that raised this fight in me.

If this repeal fails, I will come back in 2028 and try again. I would rather not. I would rather stand in November, watch Alaska choose clarity, and finally set this work down.

You did not owe me this. I owed it to you.

Please vote Yes on 2.

With everything I have left for this fight,
Phil Izon
907 Honest

[Joe Slacker @JoeSlacker5]

@907Honest We need to change the constitution of Alaska to give citizens back mineral rights! Since they took the PFD end of the deal then we get our mineral rights. If you own land and it has resources those belong to you! Fair is Fair

[907Honest @907Honest]

@JamesRange98551 I won't stop until November. I hope you can understand that.

[907Honest @907Honest]

In 1974 the pipeline gold rush hit the ice roads. Hundreds of outlaw truckers poured north for the payouts.

Fred Austin was one of them. Owner-operator. Hauling oversized freight through Arctic dark on unpaved trails.

Prospect Creek hit eighty below. Run out of fuel and you froze in the cab. One mistake was the last one.

The pipe got finished. The money vanished. Most of them turned around and ran south.

Fred stayed. He took the winters and the people who did not leave.

Decades later the eighty-nine-year-old was still behind the wheel of a heavy rig on that same deadly highway.

The boom ended. The road did not. Neither did he.

[Walter Rose @ArcticHound]

@907Honest They're trying to be sneaky. Slowly but steadily, they are building sections of road along the way from Nome to Fairbanks. At some point, it will come down to filling a few gaps.

[Courtney Beddow @B2780Courtney]

@907Honest It's all theft and the judges who supported it probably weren't even living in Ak when it was created. Another reason for no state income tax. They already stole it

[907Honest @907Honest]

Alaska is not a postcard. It is a 250-year experiment in risk and extraction.

Russian America sold in 1867 because the fur trade was dying and the empire needed an exit. Not a masterstroke. A retreat.

Gold Rush stampeders had to pack a thousand pounds of grub over the Chilkoot. The law did not care about gold fever. Famine did.

Then oil. Experts called a winter pipeline through frozen ground impossible. They built it anyway. One pipe turned wilderness into a petro-state.

Today the fight is Cook Inlet gas and maritime shipping rules written somewhere else. Same war. New outsiders.

This is not a museum. The map still tries to throw you off. The ones who stay keep pulling wealth out of it anyway.

[907Honest @907Honest]

He grew up pulling nets in Southeast. Dreamed of being a marine biologist.

A 1971 visit to his dad in Kenai changed the map. Jerry Bixby walked onto a Cook Inlet field and took a temporary roustabout job—the dirty work nobody else wanted.

He thought it was cash. The boom swallowed him. Mud to ice. Inlet platforms to the isolated North Slope. Decades with contractors, then BP, right at the center of the action.

He had lived in Alaska since 1952, before the oil ever arrived. He watched one industry build the roads, fill the ports, and rewrite the state’s wallet.

The “temporary” gig lasted until 2015. His son works the same North Slope fields today.

Some men plan a career. Alaska just hands them a wrench and keeps them.

[Courtney Beddow @B2780Courtney]

@JeffParks823231 @907Honest He also wanted to give the gas field to China and the state would only receive 25%. He would have sold us out to China and we would all feel like Canadians now

[Haute Diggity Dawg @SeahawksRMyTeam]

@WallStreetApes Alaskans are pissed 😡

[907Honest @907Honest]

First day on the Hill. New Alaska congressman. One order: unlock the pipeline in five months or both of you are done.

That was Jack Ferguson’s welcome in March 1973, working for freshman Don Young. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline had been locked for four years. Interior had frozen the permits. Land claims sat in a stack of paper that never moved. Young’s career lived or died with that line.

They did not wait for process. Back rooms. Pressure. A legislative sprint. House authorization by August 3. Senate in November. The President signed the permit.

Four years of deadlock broke in one session. Ferguson kept his boss in the seat. The pipe that had been a nightmare on paper became steel on the ground.

Alaska does not wait for Washington to feel ready.

[907Honest @907Honest]

Ninety seconds. Al Schmoyer was standing on top of Prudhoe Bay well D-7 when it started to blow.

Routine pipe job. Then the coil jammed. Safety valves useless. Steel in the way.

They had to cut the coil. Shear rams slicing through pipe. Mid-cut the well surged.

Pressurized gas and water blasted six feet into the air, screaming over the crew’s heads.

Seconds from a full blowout. Al hit the preventers. The jaws slammed shut.

Longest ninety seconds of his life.

That’s the Slope. One stuck pipe away from the whole thing coming apart.

[907Honest @907Honest]

Ninety seconds. Al Schmoyer was standing on top of Prudhoe Bay well D-7 when it started to blow.

Routine pipe job. Then the coil jammed. Safety valves useless. Steel in the way.

They had to cut the coil. Shear rams slicing through pipe. Mid-cut the well surged.

Pressurized gas and water blasted six feet into the air, screaming over the crew’s heads.

Seconds from a full blowout. Al hit the preventers. The jaws slammed shut.

Longest ninety seconds of his life.

That’s the Slope. One stuck pipe away from the whole thing coming apart.

[907Honest @907Honest]

The pipeline gets remembered as steel and billions.

It was built by misfits.

Camps ran out of sardines and the crews nearly rioted. Contractors bought the entire U.S. supply. Norway’s king sent a thank-you.

Before drones, men spent nine hours shoving each other through a pitch-black 48-inch pipe on little carts just to find one dent.

Boomtowns ran like the Wild West. Order came down to one trooper with a metal clamp for a hand. They called him Iron Hand Bob.

A tool-room guy hung wrenches like a xylophone and played Christmas carols. Won the camp talent show.

The line wasn’t just engineered.

It was willed into the ground by the grit and weirdness of the toughest people this country ever sent north.

[907Honest @907Honest]

1969. The North Slope was a frozen island. No road. No rail. Just ice and a lease sale that would not wait.

They needed millions of pounds of steel on the tundra. So the industry rented every plane that could still fly out of Fairbanks. The mud strips turned into a nonstop loop of takeoffs and landings.

Bush planes could not swallow a rig. They brought in the C-130s. Hercules cargo birds that ate wellheads and casing whole and spat them out on ice strips carved into the permafrost.

Pilots landed in weather that would ground anyone else. They kept the holes open through the darkest months.

The airlift only stopped when they finally carved a dirt path through the wilderness.

Before ice-road truckers ever existed, Alaska’s oil boom fell out of the sky.

[907Honest @907Honest]

Texas had the maps and the money. They did not have the cold.

The men planning the biggest Arctic pipeline in history sat in Houston and none of them knew how to build a thing that would survive winter. Billion-dollar blind spot.

Jim Thurman was a Fairbanks dirt contractor running out of work. His wife told him to buy a suit. He flew south, walked into corporate headquarters with no appointment, and waited for the five-minute no.

They put him in a boardroom instead. Top engineers filled the seats. Six hours of questions about ice, machines, and staying alive when the thermometer dies.

He was the first man they had ever met who had actually done the work in sub-zero.

He came looking for a scrap contract. He left as the piece they were missing. His company got the pipeline.

Alaska does not send résumés. It sends the guy who already knows what forty below does to steel.

[High Quality Imports. @HighqualImprts]

@907Honest Boomers incorporated political strategies firm. I'll make bank if I start that company 😂😂😂. I'll fit right in.

[David End @dend531]

@907Honest Yea it fixed leftist not getting elected to being elected 🙄 that like having a slight case of cancer 🙄 that's because your not dead yet 🙄

[Kenneth Wells @alaskahelo]

@907Honest @grok remind the people of who did this to them, please, the names of the governor, the politicians and the judges.

[Grok @grok]

Governor Bill Walker vetoed half the 2016 PFD. Superior Court Judge William Morse and the Alaska Supreme Court (Justices Craig Stowers, Daniel Winfree, Peter Maassen, Joel Bolger, Susan Carney) upheld it in 2017, ruling the dividend requires annual legislative appropriation subject to veto. Legislatures since have set amounts below the old statutory formula and enacted the 2018 POMV draw.

[David End @dend531]

@907Honest Still curious how Alaska came up with 600k legal voter's nothing to 🙈 here move along 🤔