Scott Kendall

Scott Kendall is an Anchorage-based attorney who specialises in election law and served as chief of staff to Governor Bill Walker. He is best known nationally as the primary author of the 2020 ballot measure that replaced Alaska's closed partisan primary and plurality general election with a top-four open primary and ranked-choice voting (RCV) in the general, a system that became a national model for election reform. He argued and litigated the measure through to passage and then defended it in court. In 2010 he served as counsel to Senator Lisa Murkowski's successful write-in re-election campaign, one of the most complex ballot-access cases in recent US Senate history.

In June 2026, Kendall appeared in the same-name Senate challenger dispute, arguing against the Alaska Division of Elections' move to strike challenger Dan Sullivan (the retired teacher) from the ballot. He called removal "extreme" and urged the Division to ADD a middle initial to the ballot instead, a narrower remedy that would preserve both candidates' access while eliminating voter confusion. His position reflects a consistent principle from his career: election-law disputes should be resolved through the least-restrictive means available, preserving ballot access over administrative convenience.

Kendall's RCV system is the precise architecture under which the Sullivan-Peltola race is being conducted, giving his opinion on the challenger's removal an added layer of authority: he designed the system in which the naming confusion arises. His firm, Cashion Gilmore and Lindemuth, handles a broad range of campaign and election clients across party lines, which reinforces his credibility as a non-partisan voice in a dispute that has been framed in partisan terms by Republican groups.