This story was produced in partnership with Bolts Magazine.
I.
The state troopers came first for Tupe Smith.
They arrived in a pair on November 30, 2023, travelling a stretch of highway that starts in Anchorage but quickly becomes quite rural. They drove past a ski resort and a small shopping center, then turned off through a forested valley with no cell service, until they reached the entrance to the longest highway tunnel in the country: the portal to Whittier, Alaska.
The one-lane tunnel, which carves 2.5 dark, musty, bumpy miles through a glacial mountain, opens for two 15-minute periods every hour, once for each direction; the troopers caught the 10 a.m. window heading east. On the other side, Whittier’s punishing microclimate — more snow than Aspen, Amazon-level rainfall, and almost nonstop wind — greeted them with cold, wet bluster.
This small port town was built by the military during World War II, as the U.S. warred with Japan. In the 1950s during the Cold War, the military constructed two gigantic housing structures, one of which is still in use: The 14-story complex, set back a few blocks from the waterfront, houses nearly all of Whittier’s roughly 300 residents. Inside this tower, people shop for groceries, get mail, attend church, exercise, and gather in community. The officers parked their Ford Explorer outside the complex.
Smith is part of a large, tight-knit community of people who’ve moved to Whittier from American Samoa, a U.S. territory some 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean. She’s called this complex home for years, so when the troopers knocked at the door of her third-floor unit, she didn’t bother to look through the peephole before opening it; in Whittier, there are no strangers.
She had just fed breakfast to her children, one a kindergartener and the other an 11-month-old. Her husband, Mike Pese, a first responder, had worked a late shift and was still sleeping.
“You got a few minutes to talk?” Sergeant Nathan Bucknall asked when Smith opened up. He read out her Miranda rights.
THE MONTH PRIOR, on Oct. 3, Smith had been elected to the local school board. She hadn’t particularly wanted to run, but had been urged over several years by teachers at Whittier’s school, which serves grades pre-K to 12 in a single building. The student body is so small that some years nobody graduates. Though the school is mere steps from the apartment tower, students often commute via an underground walking tunnel connecting the two buildings. It’s possible to pass many consecutive days in Whittier without ever stepping outside.
Smith, a frequent volunteer at the school, revered educators from a young age; her aunt, a special-ed teacher, had always been especially good with Smith’s little sister, Eseta, who has Down syndrome. Growing up in American Samoa, Smith dreamed of becoming a teacher herself one day, and in 2011 enrolled in college courses to that end. But when Eseta’s medical needs outgrew American Samoa’s health care system, Smith dropped out of college and accompanied her sister to California. There, she connected on Facebook with Pese, who grew up in her village and had himself moved to the U.S. mainland, and they fell in love. The couple moved to Alaska in 2017 to be close to Pese’s mother Mili, a pillar of Whittier’s Samoan community who owns Kozy Korner, the grocery store inside the apartment complex, and leads youth services at the church in the basement.
At the Whittier school, Smith read to and cooked for the kids, more than half of whom were Samoan. Smith speaks Samoan, so was a valuable aide to the many students who were still learning English. Her pancakes were a hit with the kids and, during the COVID pandemic, she prepared and delivered meals to their apartments.
There wasn’t much of a candidate pool in such a small town, so Smith was an obvious choice for the school board. She ran unopposed and won, with 106 votes.
And that, she learned, is what brought the Alaska State Troopers through the Whittier tunnel on that wet November morning. In registering to vote and filing to run, Smith violated election law, Bucknall explained. “The voting integrity system is actually held pretty high up,” he said. “It’s got to be protected.”
Unbeknownst to Smith at the time, she had no right to vote in Whittier elections, much less run for office. Though she was born in a U.S. territory, and has a U.S. passport and Social Security number, she is not a U.S. citizen. American Samoa is the only U.S. state or territory where people are born without automatic citizenship, and without the right to vote in state, federal, and most local elections anywhere outside of American Samoa.
Unlike people born in the other U.S. territories of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoans are classified simply as “U.S. nationals” — a sort of limbo state that acknowledges they are American by birth, but still denied the full rights and privileges of citizenship.
“Unfortunately, I have some bad news here: There’s an arrest warrant out for you.”
Even though they pay taxes, owe “allegiance” by law to the United States, and can join or be drafted into the military — American Samoans have long served in and died for the U.S. military at exceptionally high rates — non-citizen American Samoan nationals cannot register to vote, run for office, serve on juries, or hold any job requiring citizenship. Unless they can claim citizenship through a parent or grandparent, American Samoan nationals must apply for citizenship as though they were immigrants. That process can be costly, confusing, and long.
As non-citizen nationals, they exist in a formal underclass of democracy that precludes them from, for one, running for a local school board.
“I’m not saying you murdered someone or anything like that, OK?” Bucknall told Smith. “Unfortunately, I have some bad news here: There’s an arrest warrant out for you.”
Smith told the troopers she had no idea she’d done anything wrong. The fine print of American Samoa’s exclusion from full participation in U.S. democracy is not well understood by most people — including many American Samoans themselves, and even most Alaska officials. “I know that I cannot vote for the president,” Smith told the troopers. “I didn’t know that I can’t vote for anything else.”
As the troopers handcuffed Smith in front of her son and baby daughter, her husband, Pese, fought the urge to lash out in her defense. She tried to conceal her hands under a jacket so that neighbors would not notice the cuffs when the troopers perp-walked her out of the building and into their SUV. Smith sobbed silently in the car, through the tunnel and over a rainy 72-mile drive to a jail north of Anchorage. Pese followed in his own car, pulling off only to withdraw $500 to bail out his wife. At the jail, Smith was ordered to strip naked, and cried while officers searched her. She sat alone behind bars in a jail uniform, waiting to make bail, and cried some more.
“I felt so embarrassed, because people looked at me as this really nice girl who helped do all this good stuff, go to church every Sunday,” Smith told me when we met in August in Whittier. “I thought that I was doing something good with my life, having my kids in this place and volunteering.”
Smith recalled that she could hardly speak on the car ride home from jail. “The experience was something that I never thought, at my lowest, that I would go through,” she told me. “Especially seeing my children cry when they took me out in cuffs.
“That broke me.”
II.
ALMOST A YEAR PASSED before the troopers returned to Whittier, this time to cast a far wider net.
Smith’s arrest warrant included 10 felony counts of voter misconduct. The state took five of them to a grand jury, which rejected three charges and indicted Smith on two counts that each carry five-year prison terms.
But it turned out she wasn’t the only U.S. national in Whittier who was unsure of their voting rights and vulnerable to prosecution. In the months following Smith’s arrest, Bucknall investigated dozens of her relatives and neighbors; Whittier became a target for officials eager to track down — and to punish — illegal voting.
There has long been confusion around the voting rights, or lack thereof, of American Samoans in Alaska, where they make up a greater share of the population than in any U.S. state but Hawai’i. And plenty of non-citizen nationals in Alaska had been voting for years. It had never been an issue, mostly because few people were aware any issue existed.
Many American Samoans have come to Alaska, the second-nearest U.S. state to the Pacific Islands, for education, jobs, and health care. And over the years, candidates for offices major and obscure across the state have solicited their votes. Government officials who register people to vote have often registered American Samoans and failed to give residents the option to identify as non-citizen U.S. nationals on official forms. The Alaska DMV, which doubles as a voter registration office, admits it did not include that option on its forms until 2022 — well after Smith, Pese, and others in Whittier first were registered.
“Hardly anybody knows the difference between a citizen and a national. Only lawyers know that.”
The state has also recently admitted that it registered an unspecified number of non-citizens to vote between 2022 and 2024. Alaska’s own mistakes are causing problems beyond just Whittier: A couple in Kodiak could now be deported over their erroneous registrations, according to a new lawsuit filed just last month.
“Hardly anybody knows the difference between a citizen and a national. Only lawyers know that,” Margaret Stock, an immigration attorney in Anchorage representing the Kodiak couple, told me. “The Alaska DMV or other entities of Alaska’s government are registering people to vote when they’re not citizens; they do it all the time.” She told me she knows of “dozens and dozens” of cases in which the state registered people who were not eligible.
In 2022, a year before Smith’s election, some Samoans in Anchorage founded a nonprofit group called Pacific Community of Alaska to tackle health and social disparities that widened during the pandemic. Anchorage was about to hold a mayoral election, and the nonprofit realized that many American Samoans had no clear understanding of whether they were eligible to participate. So the group contacted Alaska’s Division of Elections with a simple query: Could American Samoan nationals vote in local and state elections?
Pacific Community says the Division of Elections claimed it didn’t know the answer, and that it referred the nonprofit to Anchorage’s municipal elections office, which said it also didn’t know, and referred the nonprofit back to the state. The 2022 election arrived and Pacific Community still had no clear guidance, so it shared none with its members; some people did end up voting under questionable eligibility. “The people interpreting the laws don’t even understand the damn laws,” Tafi Toleafoa, Pacific Community’s director, told me over the summer.
It was not until 2024 that the state finally sent the group a letter with a firm answer: “If a person who is not a U.S. citizen registers or votes, legal penalties could apply.”
Over several months of interviews with a wide variety of Alaska officials, including state lawmakers, local elected leaders, and law enforcement personnel, I found that very few of them could define a U.S. national and that most had no knowledge of what non-citizen American Samoans can and cannot do by right.
John Coghill, a Republican state lawmaker from 1999 to 2021, who served at different points as majority leader of both statehouse chambers, told me he didn’t even learn of the democratic exclusion of non-citizen nationals until 2025. In all his years legislating on voting and elections policy, he said, “The Samoan issue didn’t even come up.”
Toleafoa told me she’s personally aware of “more than 100” non-citizen American Samoans in Alaska who have voted in state or local elections. I met several such folks myself.
“I walked into an elementary school to vote; I showed them my Alaska state ID and they handed me a ballot,” said one non-citizen American Samoan woman in Anchorage, who requested anonymity out of fear she’d be punished like Smith. “Me just even telling my story worries me. There was misinformation. They were confused, I was confused.”
“The people interpreting the laws don’t even understand the damn laws.”
III.
JUST BEFORE ANCHORAGE HELD its 2022 election, as Pacific Community was seeking clarity, Whittier held its own local election. Many Samoans there, including Smith and her family, united around Dan Blair, a former Whittier mayor who was seeking a comeback. It was an important election for Whittier, which was, and still is, at an economic and cultural crossroads.
The area is abundant in natural wonders — the town is ringed by mountains and glaciers and waterfalls, and sits at the head of a magnificent deep-water bay — but it has struggled to capitalize on its resources. The single-lane tunnel, which didn’t even open to road traffic until 2000, is a frail connection to the outside world, and the town has few commercial offerings for tourists: hardly any lodging, a handful of restaurants and gift shops and tour companies, and a beat-up waterfront that isn’t very walkable.
Still, dozens of cruise ships dock in Whittier every year, usually as a final stop before travelers fly home from Anchorage. A new, second cruise terminal has just opened in town, promising a projected 150,000 more annual visitors. But Blair and his supporters fear it could prove more curse than blessing. He believes Whittier must grow its economy, and sees great potential for new shops and restaurants to cater to all these new tourists, but he wants commercial leases and licenses to stay local, lest big business enter and snatch Whittier’s soul in the process.
“We’ve almost gone bankrupt as a city, at least twice,” Blair told me over a few Bud Lights at a dive bar on the edge of town. He looks and sounds like a windblown Woody Harrelson.
“Every time we get enough money to build a swingset, the thieves show up and take it out of the tunnel,” Blair said. He grumbled about newcomers, so-called “gentrifiers” who, in his view, are moving in to fancify Whittier and price out poor and middle-class locals. Things may be trending that way already; units inside the apartment complex that not long ago sold for $30,000 now command four or five times that amount.
Blair, who is white, is popular with Whittier’s Samoan population and among many of the town’s old-timers.
“He’s for the community,” Smith’s husband, Pese, told me. But Blair is unpopular — loathed even, in some cases — among many of the newer, upwardly mobile residents whom he distrusts. Still, in 2022, Blair managed to get elected by 13 votes, 66 to 53, against a candidate more closely aligned with town administrators pursuing an aggressive plan for Whittier’s development. Smith, Pese, and many of their relatives were proud to support Blair.
“Some of the older regime don’t like change and I really believe that is the bottom line. So they stymie it,” said Blair critic Kelly Bender, a 30-year Whittier resident and head of the local chamber of commerce, who also owns a boat-charter company and a cafe at the waterfront. “I think the new people, voices new to Whittier, would like to see Whittier move forward, improve options for business, improve the looks of Whittier, open the door.”
IN A TOWN SO TINY, the Samoan families comprised a powerful voting bloc easily large enough to have swung the 2022 election in Blair’s favor. Some locals started to chirp about this, including on a private Facebook forum called “What’s What in Whittier,” a very active and sometimes combative page administered by some of the “new” voices Bender spoke of.
News of Tupe Smith’s arrest, which happened about a year after Blair’s win, spread quickly through the town. Her criminal case inflamed suspicions of those who resented the Samoans’ place in local politics, and, on December 30 of 2023, exactly a month after she’d been arrested, the state Division of Elections received an anonymous complaint alleging that “‘a large family group, many of whom were not U.S. Citizens,’ had also registered, and had voted in a recent election,” according to state documents.
The complaint was referred to the Division of Alaska State Troopers, and Bucknall, the sergeant who’d arrested Smith, began a nearly year-long investigation. He combed through Whittier’s voter rolls in search of non-citizens, then sent the list to the federal Department of Homeland Security, which, documents show, concluded that some Whittier voters were not citizens, while the status of some others was “unclear.”
On Sept. 5, 2024, another rainy day in Whittier, the troopers returned through the tunnel, this time with a dozen cars, one of which carried a police dog. It was a highly unusual show of force from a department that in recent years has complained of a staff shortage so severe that it has not had capacity to train some officers or to address certain serious crimes.
The team spread across Whittier, surprising people at the waterfront, at the town gas station, by the tunnel, and at apartment doors.
Karen Dempster, who runs the post office in the lobby of the complex, told me, “I’d gone out to get something from my unit and I see all these troopers, some in plainclothes and others in uniform. I said, ‘Is there a problem?’ They didn’t want to talk. While they’re waiting for the elevator they’re calling out names on their list.” All the names were Samoan, Dempster noticed.
The troops fanned out in pairs, one of which headed for Smith’s unit. This time, when the knock came, she peered through the peephole; she’d learned well by then to fear police. But the troopers weren’t there for her. They wanted to speak with her husband.
Video of their interrogation of Pese shows that the police were also confused. “I thought people of American Samoa were U.S. citizens,” Trooper Richard Chambers said, fiddling with Pese’s passport at the kitchen table.
Pese said he was nervous to answer questions the “wrong” way. He told the troopers that he had thought he could vote in Alaska elections, but not in federal ones, and that he only learned U.S. nationals could not run for office once his wife was arrested.
Neither did Chambers’ partner that day, Jason Knier, understand the law: Now that Pese and his family knew they couldn’t run for office, Knier suggested, the next best thing might be to find another like-minded Samoan candidate in Whittier who was a U.S. citizen. “Help them get elected. Campaign for them. Hang up signs,” Knier advised. “You can vote for that position, right? Because you can still vote in the state election.” This botched interpretation of the law came almost an hour into the interrogation.
“No, that’s what got us here,” Chambers reminded his partner.
Similar interviews were playing out all over town. Pese and Smith’s text message groups began to light up. No one was arrested that day, but nine months later, in May of 2024, Pese and nine other family members — his mom, his twin brothers, and a slew of cousins — received court summonses in the mail. They were all accused of felony voter misconduct, along with perjury, and they were due to appear in court in Anchorage. They each now face up to 10 years in prison.
IV.
PESE WONDERS IF MUCH OF THIS trouble might have been averted by simple public education. As a child growing up in American Samoa, he remembers being taught about righteous American wars and the basics of U.S. government structure; he vividly recalls a lesson on Gettysburg. But he doesn’t remember ever being taught in school about American Samoa itself — about its history and role in the broader American empire, about why people born everywhere else in the country are citizens by birthright.
“Everyone speaks Samoan over there, but the main subjects we all have to pass were English, writing, math, and history,” he told me. “In the history books we learned from, it has nothing to do with the U.S. territory.”
American Samoa became a U.S. territory in 1900, having been previously governed in a shared power agreement among the U.S., England, and Germany over what were previously united Samoan lands. After 1900, the islands were broken up into two separate entities: the current territory of American Samoa and what is now the independent nation of Samoa. The U.S. Navy secured deeds of cession from Samoan chiefs in a colonial governance structure that ensured U.S. government control but promised preservation of local customs, including the governing authority of traditional chiefs.
“In the history books we learned from, it has nothing to do with the U.S. territory.”
This was a period of major American expansion around the globe. Military and economic ambitions, blessed by the Monroe Doctrine, led the U.S. to explode into a global imperial power, snatching up islands all over the world at feverish pace for their natural resources and strategic positioning. At one point, the U.S. controlled, either formally or informally, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and The Philippines, among other territories and countless unincorporated islands.
American Samoa’s current status as a member of a democratic underclass was cemented starting in 1901 in a series of plainly racist U.S. Supreme Court rulings that stand to this day. The rulings together are known as the Insular Cases, which clarified that people living in U.S. territories, including American Samoa, were not entitled to the same constitutional protections as other Americans. The court called people living in the territories “alien races” and referred to colonial subjects as “savage tribes,” “uncivilized” and not practiced in “Anglo-Saxon principles.”
None of this was taught in school to Pese, nor to the many other American Samoans I met in Alaska. Pese said he didn’t know that other territories even existed until he was a teenager. He knew American Samoa was part of the U.S. — it’s in the name, after all — and it was instilled in him from a young age that he should be proud to be American. U.S. flags wave atop government buildings in American Samoa; July 4 and the NFL are as big, or bigger, there as in the mainland U.S.
While people born in other U.S. territories eventually gained birthright citizenship, American Samoa never did, in large part because many islanders worry that giving automatic U.S. citizenship to people born on American Samoan soil would compromise the territory’s own sovereignty. American Samoa’s government has, in fact, formally opposed automatic citizenship for its people, out of fear that various local rules, including those that prohibit non-native Samoans from owning most property there, would be repealed as a result.
Pese says he never had to consider his ambiguous status as a non-citizen U.S. national until he moved to the mainland. “I pay the same taxes as a U.S. citizen, but I cannot have a voice to represent what I feel is right within my own community. It’s frustrating,” he told me. “I was born with a Social Security number, I’ve got a U.S. passport.”
In Anchorage, I met an American Samoan woman named Maddy Unutoa, who runs an advocacy group to advance civil rights for Samoans living in Alaska. Like Pese, Unutoa told me she never thought about American Samoa’s place in the U.S. empire until she left home.
“I pay the same taxes as a U.S. citizen, but I cannot have a voice to represent what I feel is right within my own community. It’s frustrating.”
“The feeling there is pride — proud of being American,” she said. “I grew up being told we were always more powerful than the independent state of Samoa, because of currency, and being protected by the most powerful military ever. That was the safety net, that’s the mindset everywhere you go in American Samoa.
“I do not remember ever being taught that I have second-class citizenship,” she continued. “I learned all of that moving back here.”
The question of American Samoan suffrage remains a matter of significant debate, both informal and legal. It most recently gained steam in 2021, when the U.S. District Court in Utah ruled in favor of three American Samoans living in the state, who’d argued that they should be entitled to citizenship under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. That amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals took up the case and reversed the district court’s decision — in part, it said, out of respect for the wishes of American Samoa’s own government. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and so the ruling stood.
Now, anti-colonial lawyers see a new chance in Tupe Smith’s case. Attorneys with the national group Right to Democracy, which works to unwind the legacy of colonial rule in the U.S., initially sought to dismiss Smith’s case. Last November, after it lost that fight, the group took her case to the Alaska Court of Appeals, arguing in favor of citizenship for American Samoans under the 14th Amendment. Oral arguments in that case are set for Jan. 15.
Politics in Whittier are usually as local as local gets, but many there have lately gotten up to speed on and are now backing the 14th Amendment argument. Blair, who’d been re-elected as mayor in that 2022 election, introduced a resolution last year decrying “discrimination” against American Samoans and urging that Alaska amend its constitution to grant state and local voting rights to American Samoan nationals. One longtime white resident and reindeer owner painted a sign outside her gift shop at the waterfront: “American Samoans are Americans / 14th Amendment,” it reads.
“This shouldn’t be an option under the 14th Amendment,” Blair told me. “It’s the typical colonization B.S.
“One of the most valuable things you can ever have is citizenship,” he said. “To say, ‘Welcome to the United States — where you’ve already been living! — you have no voice,’ is pretty sad.” Blair’s resolution passed the city council last spring by a vote of 6-1.
V.
THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE NAGGING at Blair and other Whittier residents I met: They want to know how the state troopers came to target Whittier in the first place.
Austin McDaniel, a spokesperson for the Division of Alaska State Troopers, told me his office doesn’t seek out voter misconduct cases. It does, however, respond to citizen complaints. Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore, who supervises all criminal prosecutions in Alaska, told me his office, which is now prosecuting the 11 Samoans from Whittier, is simply doing so in response to evidence handed over by the troopers.
Court documents suggest that the original complaint came from someone in Whittier. According to these filings, the anonymous complainant claimed that they learned from one of Mike Pese’s brothers, Mark, that “he was not a U.S. Citizen but had nevertheless voted in the most recent municipal election.”
Everyone in town has a theory on who sent in the complaint. “It’s very clear,” Blair said, “that someone in our community hates somebody bad enough, and knew a phone number to call.” No one has yet admitted to the act, either publicly or in a long series of conversations I’ve been having with Whittier residents since July. Most connect the complaint to Blair’s 2022 victory.
“Somebody decided that his margin of winning was skewed by the people who may have voted illegally,” Deputy Mayor Peter Denmark told me from the deck of his kayak-tour company at Whittier’s waterfront. “Some people think there was some skullduggery afoot.”
“There was an unwritten rule: ‘What happens in Whittier stays in Whittier,’” he added, pulling from a Marlboro Red. The anonymous complaint changed that.
When I interviewed Skidmore, the deputy attorney general, I mentioned how the criminal cases looked from the family’s perspective: They insist that they did not know they were breaking the law, and that government officials, including people who handle voter registration and the troopers who conducted the investigation, were clearly just as confused as they were about the voting rights of American Samoans. I asked Skidmore why the state is still pursuing charges.
“Ignorance of the law is not a defense,” Skidmore replied.
I asked him if this situation might be better resolved through public education, and with improved training for the state officials whose own confusion about voter eligibility had helped create this mess. There is some precedent, after all, for a non-punitive fix to this exact problem: Nobody was prosecuted when Oregon last year discovered it had registered hundreds of non-citizens, nor when an American Samoan national ran for the Hawai’i state House as a Republican in 2018, not realizing she was ineligible.
But Skidmore made clear that the state does not regard this as a matter of harmless confusion. “We have to establish, in order to charge a crime, that someone knew that they were in fact not a U.S. citizen, that they were not eligible to vote as a result.” He would not comment on specific evidence in the Whittier cases. Transcripts of the state’s presentation to grand juries in these cases — documents that would presumably elucidate the state’s precise arguments — remain sealed, as the cases are all still pending.
But this much does seem clear: The state, per Skidmore, is not moved by the family members’ insistence that they identified as citizens on registration forms because they were confused, and in some cases directly misinformed by officials who were supposed to be sources of clarity. On the contrary, he emphasized that the state is determined to prove that this family acted with criminal intent.
“The fact that law enforcement might tell someone something that’s inaccurate doesn’t impact our opinion.”
I asked Skidmore whether it matters to these cases that officials were themselves confused about the law; he said it does not: “The fact that law enforcement might tell someone something that’s inaccurate doesn’t impact our opinion.”
He went so far as to say his office has an “obligation” to prosecute this case, in order to demonstrate to the public “that our elections are held in a way that the citizens can trust.”
“Otherwise,” Skidmore said, “we end up with violence, and that’s the worst thing for us all in a democracy. I think when people don’t trust elections, when they don’t trust what’s going on, then they have a tendency to lash out.”
VI.
ON A FRIDAY EVENING LAST SPRING, a couple of weeks after the group of Whittier Samoans received their summonses in the mail, one of the accused family members, Mike’s 65-year-old mother, Mili, collapsed from a stroke while leading a youth service in the chapel in the basement of the town’s apartment complex.
Mili, the matriarch of the local Samoan community, was one of the first Samoans to lay down roots in Whittier. She owns Kozy Korner, the food market inside the apartment complex, where she sells non-perishables, kitchen staples, and even a few comforts from home, like coconut milk. She lets the kids raid the ice cream cooler and organizes local events, including an annual July 4 cookout.
Pese began to cry as we discussed his mother’s health. “She doesn’t want to feel stressed, she’s always smiling and doesn’t want us to worry,” he said. “But that day during the youth service when she gave her sermon and had her stroke, that’s when I knew she’d been hiding her stress. She doesn’t want us to see it.”
Mili’s condition had worsened by the time I got to Whittier this past summer, months after her stroke. Additional testing had revealed a lump in her leg that had metastasized into Stage 4 of a rare and aggressive cancer. She spent the summer in Seattle getting treatment and was scheduled for a major surgery in October.
Over a video call in August, Mili told me she never meant to break the law. “I did not know,” she said. “It stresses me out, it stresses me a lot, going through with my treatments and everything. I try to be happy and forget everything until my treatment is all done.
“It’s really sad. It’s so sad, when I think about it. I love Whittier. The first time I arrived there, I was really happy. It’s really safe for my family, my kids. That’s why I spend all my time helping the community. All these things happening, it’s kind of changed my mind. My kids ask me why we don’t leave Whittier. But I think we need to stay, we need to fight for what’s right for us.”
Smith had wanted to join her mother-in-law in Seattle before the surgery as her round-the-clock caretaker, but ultimately she and Pese decided to stay home to keep earning money in case they end up owing court fines. Smith, who works as a toll collector at the Whittier tunnel, is especially worried about money now that she might have a conviction on her record, which could affect future employment prospects. She worries she won’t get promoted ever again because of the charges, and her childhood dream of becoming a teacher now seems more distant than ever.
“I feel like it’s too much sometimes, when I’m alone,” Smith told me. “I usually run down to the store to talk to my mother-in-law to try to distract each other from what’s going on. I don’t get to have that anymore because she’s away.”
On nights when Pese is away at work, as the kids sleep, Smith finds herself desperate for distraction. “There are times when I sit in a room, and it’s so quiet,” she says. She cleans to stay busy.
More than once, after midnight, she’s found herself scrubbing down an area of the house only to realize she’d already just cleaned it.
LATE LAST SUMMER, the state offered plea deals to all of the defendants except Tupe Smith. This would have allowed them to avoid incarceration; some were offered deals promising to clear their records if they went a year without another offense.
On a Sunday morning in August, while these offers were still fresh, Tafi Toleafoa, director of Pacific Community of Alaska, visited Whittier and joined the Samoan community in the church in the basement of the apartment tower. Samoan families sat on one side of the room, and on the other side were some of their white neighbors. One of the defendants, Nelson Vaimoa, led the service, and others charged with illegal voting, including Smith, sang in the choir.
Toleafoa addressed the congregants, as piano music played and young children squirmed in the back of the room. She asked the defendants not to accept any plea deals, telling them she was worried about the precedent that might be set: If the state could claim any measure of victory in the Whittier prosecutions, how would that affect the many non-citizen nationals living elsewhere in Alaska? Might they be prosecuted on the same grounds?
“I ask for perseverance,” Toleafoa told the room. “Because the justice system takes a very long time and sometimes it’s not even justice, right? You don’t find justice in our justice system.
“You make the decision that is right for you, but know that the impact of this case will be very vital for our community here in Alaska.”
Soon after, Mili spoke on a video call from Seattle, where she was awaiting her big surgery in October. Smith held a phone up to a mic: “I don’t fear anything,” Mili told the congregation. She began to cry and then almost wail, as slow, moody piano music played in the background. “We have to stand proud,” she said. “We have to stand firm, not just fade away.”
She went on: “I miss everyone. I just want to come home. … Everyday, I pray for God’s healing.” The choir started up again as she wrapped her remarks, so that for 30 seconds or so her sobs were layered over their song.
All this seemed to be enough to convince any family members tempted by a plea deal not to go through with it.
Earlier in the week, Mike Pese had told me he was inclined to accept the offer, just to get it all over with. He’s the type to plan for the worst, he said, and pleading guilty would at least guarantee that he and Smith wouldn’t be incarcerated at the same time, both away from their children. But after the service, he said, “If the state is using us as a starting point to start prosecuting all these U.S. nationals all over the state, then taking the deal is not a viable option for us.”
I asked Taleafoa to tell me more about American Samoans in Alaska who are potentially vulnerable to future prosecutions for voting, or at least registering to vote, without knowing they’d done anything wrong. “It’s not potential,” she said. “There are thousands of people.”
VII.
THE STATE TROOPERS INSIST they weren’t searching for voting crimes in Whittier. “We didn’t go out looking for this; we received a complaint,” McDaniel, the spokesperson, told me. “We don’t go through and cull voter rolls and check in this or that database to see if someone’s a resident or a citizen. We don’t do that.”
There is plenty of evidence, though, that Republican officials in Alaska — and across the country more broadly — are very much looking for a fight over non-citizen voting, to make it appear widespread and to further the false claim that the nation’s elections are rife with fraud. In the Whittier case, they may have found their best opportunity yet.
The state Division of Elections has happily complied with the Trump administration’s hunt for illegal voting by non-citizens, handing over its voter rolls to the U.S. Department of Justice when asked in 2025.
But illegal voting by non-citizens is exceedingly rare, both in Alaska and across the country. According to the state attorney general’s office, only seven people had even been charged with any form of voter misconduct in Alaska in the last decade, meaning that the Whittier defendants alone make up the majority of the state’s voter fraud cases in the Trump era. Only four people in that period were convicted, and none of them for offenses having anything to do with non-citizen voting.
In Anchorage I met with Andrew Gray, a Democratic state representative who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Last year he convened a special legislative hearing to discuss the Whittier cases. “I absolutely think that the reason there was a raid [in Whittier] and why we’re pursuing these prosecutions is because it gives some ammunition to the folks who want to say that our election system is not safe, and that non-citizens vote,” he told me.
Alaska’s next legislative session opens this month, and Gray argued that lawmakers should respond to the Whittier prosecutions by referring to the ballot a constitutional amendment to grant state and local voting rights to non-citizen nationals.
The Alaska legislature is run by an unusual coalition of Democrats and Republican lawmakers who’ve broken from their party, while the governor is a conservative, Trump-friendly Republican. Gray finds it unlikely the constitutional amendment would succeed in this context. “There is simply no way that I can market anything to expand privileges to American nationals. The way that will be perceived by folks on the right is that we’re trying to make Alaska a sanctuary state,” he said. “I can hear that already.”
“I absolutely think that the reason there was a raid [in Whittier] and why we’re pursuing these prosecutions is because it gives some ammunition to the folks who want to say that our election system is not safe, and that non-citizens vote.”
He went on, mulling his feelings aloud: “Is there value in filing to raise the issue? To use it as a talking point? I don’t know. This is the right thing to do, so maybe we have the discussion about it.”
Meanwhile, prominent Alaska conservatives are forging ahead with their own ballot proposal, to ban non-citizen voting in the state. It’s already forbidden in Alaska — and everywhere else in the country, save for the handful of towns and cities that allow non-citizen voting in certain local elections — and the new ballot measure would do little except emphasize current law: someone “may” vote in Alaska if they are a U.S. citizen above 18 years old who has lived in the state at least 30 days prior to an election; the ballot measure would change the law to say that “only” people meeting those qualifications may vote in Alaska. The measure will appear on the 2026 ballot, if organizers get enough signatures to qualify.
Coghill, the Republican former majority leader of the Alaska House and Senate, is now co-chairing the amendment campaign. He told me he’s seen that several cities around the country allow local voting by non-citizens, and that he wants to make sure that never happens in Alaska. He told me the measure isn’t a response to the Whittier case.
There is a special irony to the ballot measure and the Whittier case: Alaska was itself a U.S. territory, with limited voting rights and political representation, until 1959, and many Alaskans, led by Native and women activists in particular, fought for their democratic inclusion prior to statehood. What’s more, Tupe Smith is hardly the first person to seek a government position there under dubious qualifications: The second person to ever serve as territorial governor of Alaska, John Franklin Strong in 1913, was himself an undocumented Canadian immigrant.
VIII.
THE DAY BEFORE THE WHITTIER FOLKS were formally arraigned in court in May 2025, Nelson Vaimoa, who led the church service I attended, was driving some water samples from the town to Anchorage, when he saw police lights behind him. Vaimoa, who worked for the tunnel and was driving a company truck, said he was distracted by the upcoming court date, and didn’t realize he was speeding.
“I was only thinking about the case, because the next day is the case, is the hearing,” Vaimoa told me. He said he was fired later that day after he told his boss about the speeding ticket.
The next day, Vaimoa stood in court alongside his family members, including his wife, who was pregnant with their first child and also faced charges for non-citizen voting. Many of the defendants struggled to keep up with what was being said; the court made little effort to translate materials into Samoan, and botched some of what it did try to translate. Taleafoa couldn’t help laughing from the back of the room, she told me, when the court, attempting to translate the word “criminal,” simply made up a word for it: “criminale,” which has no meaning in Samoan.
Everything Vaimoa knew about the justice system to that point had come from television and movies. “My hands never sweat that much before,” he said of that first court appearance. “This was a whole different experience — terrifying.”
He was despondent in our interview a few months later in August, far from the joyful leader I’d seen during the church service an hour prior. “I have no job. I need to stay up with paying my car, my insurance,” he said.
Vaimoa told me that when he voted locally, he felt proud — a real part of his community. He’d seen so many ads encouraging Alaskans to vote, and the state had certainly cleared the path for him to do so by sending him a voter registration card. “I was so happy that I had to exercise my right to vote,” he said. He had the card handy in his wallet and showed it to me.
Now, he added, “Whenever I see someone I just put my head down and don’t say anything because of this whole case. I just don’t want to make any more mistakes.” The birth of his daughter last year has changed his perspective, he said, instilling a new sense of responsibility: “I’m at a point where it’s better to be silent, not to share my thoughts to anyone. … I have trouble trusting people now.”
After Vaimoa and the other defendants rejected the plea deals they were offered, the state secured grand jury indictments against each of them. It’s unclear where their cases go from here; no trials have yet been scheduled. Each of them — including Mili, who is now back in Whittier but who remains in fragile health — faces potentially lengthy prison time if convicted. So does Smith.
As a result of all this, some Samoans are contemplating leaving Whittier altogether. “I poured everything into Whittier,” Pese told me. “I don’t know what I would do if my mom was no longer here with me, but she’s the only reason I’m still here.”
Some longtime residents told me that this type of reaction is fairly common here: Whittier is too small, they said, to live for too long under the shadow of any public scandal. A lot of people end up simply vanishing, they said. They rarely come back.
Meanwhile, Whittier’s evolution marches on: In July, the town administration debuted a grand plan for the future of business activity in the town. The opening of the new cruise terminal here means annual cruise-ship visits are poised to jump from 46 to 72. The town may concurrently look to increase municipal fees on Whittier businesses in order to boost the local government’s revenue and attract a higher class of operator to the shore. The town development plan also includes a new RV campground and a new walking and biking corridor stretching from one end of town to the other.
Dan Blair isn’t sold on the plan. “The only thing that’s changed is that now we have more potential for money, and a lot more people trying to take it from us,” he told me. On Oct. 5, he stood for re-election, facing off against Lori Borg, the wife of the town’s harbormaster, who is more popular among newer Whittier voters who tend to favor the development plan. Borg declined my interview request.
It was an important local election, the kind in which the Samoan community in Whittier would have been eager to participate, back when they thought they could vote. Mike Pese had himself once dreamed of running for a seat on the council here, before Tupe Smith was arrested. He’s abandoned that dream, of course, and started to withdraw from public life in Whittier — even by pulling the couple’s son, Max, out of school. He and Smith now homeschool him inside their apartment.
Pese now and then runs into school teachers around town. “Sometimes they approach me; they say, ‘Hey, we miss Max!’ But after everything…” he trailed off wistfully.
Election Day came and went in Whittier, but this time Blair, who’d won by 13 votes three years ago, could not count on the support of the local Samoans. Beyond the 11 facing criminal charges, several other Samoans in the community who are citizens, and thus eligible to vote, decided to sit this one out. “They’re all too traumatized after the troopers came,” Smith told me.
Blair lost by 14 votes.
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