<figure class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_344563" style="width: 830px;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-344563">Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé teacher Amy Lloyd instructs a government class on Oct. 2, 2025. (Photo by Jamie Diep/KTOO)</figcaption></figure>

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Yaaḵoosgé Daakahídi High School teacher Electra Gardinier talked to students during a recent mock election in her fourth period U.S. Government class. She had spent the week explaining the different candidates and propositions. Now the students – most of whom are too young to vote – were casting their votes on sample ballots.

“So you have a ballot in front of you, and it looks like what I have in my hand, and on that ballot, it is asking us to vote on Proposition One, Two and Three,” Gardinier told the class. “We just talked about those propositions. It also asks you to vote for your Assembly member and school board members.”

Gardinier tallied up the votes in the school board race after class.

“For the last candidate, it looks like we would not be able to come to a consensus. Oh, no. Jeremy — J. J. J. So J. J. J., Steve Whitney and Jenny Thomas,” she said.

Students also approved all three ballot propositions in this year’s election. 

Gardinier said students that attend Yaaḵoosgé do so because they have been unsuccessful in some part of their education. She said that makes it really important for her to give her students a voice in this class.

“Sometimes that can mean that we have a population that already feels marginalized, academically, let alone how they’re feeling in other aspects of their life,” she said. “And so a lot of times, I fear that that creates this apathetic mentality of like, ‘nothing ever gets better for me. It doesn’t matter how I think. Nobody cares what my views are.’”

Gardinier said she wants students to feel engaged and heard, while also understanding what they are voting on.

“When I’m teaching, I try not to put anything above a sixth grade level. And it’s fascinating to me that a ballot is absolutely written at a level beyond that,” she said. “So I mean, I have kids who are not going to understand what they’re voting for, and that is something that I’m trying to combat.”

How did government students’ votes stack up over at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé?

Eighty students voted in that mock election. They “elected” Jenny Thomas, Melissa Cullum and Steve Whitney to the school board.

For the Juneau Assembly, Nano Brooks eked out a narrow victory over Wade Bryson by one vote in the only contested race. 

As for the ballot propositions, the students approved the first two questions, but narrowly voted down the proposed seasonal sales tax. 

At least one student at JDHS will actually be able to vote this year. 

Samuel Lagerquist filled out his ballot ahead of Election Day. He said the structure of the class helped him learn more about the different candidates and ballot propositions. He said he also learned about how his peers are thinking.

“In this class, I was kind of presented with some different perspectives that I didn’t really think about, mainly concerning the first two ballot measures,” Lagerquist said. “It also offered a really good place to, like, kind of stay updated, and motivated me to stay updated into the actual news.”

Lagerquist said he feels it’s important to vote in a local election, even when statewide and national elections often see larger turnouts.

“The sales tax or ballot initiative ones are gonna have a more, like, day-to-day, actual, real effect on me. And so I think that, honestly, it’s probably more important than, like, your national elections, even though, you know, those are really important,” Lagerquist said.

While he doesn’t plan to be in the state for college, Lagerquist said he plans on voting absentee in next year’s Alaska election, when the governor and two congressional seats will be up for grabs.

Amy Lloyd teaches government at JDHS. She said the results for the mock election were a bit unexpected.

“I thought it was going to be 70/30 and it was more like 50/50 which shows me that they understand the value of their vote, and even if they didn’t say anything in the conversation, they voted how they wanted to vote,” Lloyd said. “So that was pretty cool.”

 She said it’s a big responsibility to teach students about the government. 

“We are living in America, we’ve got to understand the government,” she said. “It’s really exciting to teach a class that is so obviously in their best interest to know and learn and pay attention to.”

Real ballots in Juneau’s by-mail election must be returned by 8 p.m. Tuesday. Initial results are expected later in the evening.