From Anchorage Press:

The lieutenant governor’s position in Alaska doesn’t carry a lot of responsibility. He or she runs the division of elections, administers the citizens’ initiative process, commissions notaries public, protects the state seal, and distributes the constitution. And that’s about it.

But the lieutenant governor also can unexpectedly become governor, as current Governor Sean Parnell and Keith Miller long before him (who succeeded Governor Wally Hickel when President Nixon appointed Hickel Secretary of the Interior) can attest. (In Miller’s time, the position was called secretary of state; it was changed to lieutenant governor in 1970)

As Steve Haycox, a professor of history at UAA, writes in an email, “the lite-guv is essentially a political position, i.e., most of the people holding it are angling for statewide visibility to help position themselves for a larger run at governor.”

But so far in Alaska’s history as a state, that’s only worked out for Parnell and Miller, when their predecessors left the governorship. At least one went on to serve in lower offices: H.A. “Red” Boucher, lieutenant governor under Governor Bill Egan, afterward served in the Alaska House of Representatives, and later the Anchorage Assembly.

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