Posted on 08/16/2022 6:36:35 AM PDT by Red Badger
In the late hours tonight, Alaskan election officials will begin the tedious process of tabulating the results for the state's at-large congressional special election. The process will be especially tedious because this will be the first Alaskan statewide election in which ranked-choice voting is used.
Instead of party primaries followed by a general election between the various party nominees, the normal procedure in most states, Alaska will be holding a contest in which voters rank the candidates based on their preference. After one round of counting first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest will be dropped. His or her voters' second choices will then be awarded their respective votes. This process will then be repeated until someone has a majority.
Does ranked-choice voting improve turnout? There is no evidence of this. Does it improve the process? Not really. Alaskans were convinced that this was somehow better and adopted it in a 2020 referendum. Tonight's experience may cause them to think again.
"It just makes the process more complex," Jason Snead told the Washington Examiner last summer. "It does not do anything to improve voter turnout or bolster voter confidence in the elections, and it is truly an unnecessary reform."
This is absolutely true, and all on its own, it would be enough reason to oppose ranked-choice voting. But there are two further considerations. The first is the confounding delay in tabulation that ranked-choice voting inevitably brings. Vote counting in Australia, where this type of voting is common, is known to drag on interminably.
Last summer, New York City provided an illustration of the needless complexity and confounding logic involved in counting ranked-choice votes. In the Democratic primary, now-Mayor Eric Adams was the first choice of far more voters than anyone else. But over the course of two weeks and seven rounds of redistributing the votes of also-rans and write-in candidates, he won by the skin of his teeth.
The second reason is more theoretical and also perhaps more important. Ranked-choice voting actually assaults the very notion of "one person, one vote," which the Supreme Court established decades ago as the standard in elections. Under ranked-choice voting, people who choose candidates with less support effectively get a second and perhaps even a third bite at the apple during the vote count. One person's votes for fourth place can override another person's first-place votes. In New York last June, those voting for other candidates besides Adams were given second and third chances to overcome the leader.
Ranked-choice voting is born from a perfectly legitimate desire to see winners get actual majorities, not just pluralities. But a much better way to accomplish that is to hold runoff elections whenever no candidate reaches a sufficient threshold — a majority or perhaps a 40% plurality. This is already done in several Southern states. In California and Washington, the top two always go to a runoff.
And ranked-choice voting, in contrast, does sometimes fail in its goal of producing a majority winner. The phenomenon of "ballot exhaustion" occurs because voters refuse to rank candidates they despise or know little about. In San Francisco's 2011 ranked-choice mayoral race, more than 27% of ballots validly cast for a first-choice candidate had to be discarded before the final tally. So ranked-choice effectively suppressed the vote of more than a quarter of the people who successfully showed up and cast valid votes. So this needlessly complex and counterintuitive voting system doesn't even accomplish its stated goals.
Runoff systems are not perfect, but they at least force candidates to build majorities by convincing voters that they are the best person for the job. In contrast, under ranked-choice voting, someone can arrive at a majority because some large number of voters thought he or she was the fourth-best choice out of seven. This method of arriving at a majority, even when it succeeds, renders said majority far less meaningful. In fact, it calls into question the point of choosing leaders through elections at all. Alaskans may, in the end, wish they had chosen "no" as their first choice in that 2020 referendum.
I bet you can’t rank the same person for all the slots can you.
The Dims and RINOs are counting on “ranked choice” to save Murkowski. True one-man one-vote voting and she’d lose.
Democrats
Two points
If one candidate gets over 50%, then no ranking is done.
I understood that there were no be write in options in the second round (which makes sense as the first round’s purpose is to whittle the field to 4). The election info in Alaska is now advising that write ins are an option.
I don’t get the connection......................🤔
Maine has RCV.
NYC now has RCV for mayoral elections.
Those RCV provisions were in HR1 for a reason.
Just that I voted in the Alaska election yesterday. My additional comments, intended to appear below the pics disappeared due to my fumble fingers. This morning:
With 69% of the votes counted, it looks like Murkowski is edging out Tshibaka.
Palin is losing to Peltola (D) to replace Young, but at least Begich won't be going to DC.
Semi bright side is that Dunleavy is solidly in the lead in the Governor's race.
Oh, I thought it had something to do with the knife!..................
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