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.
Who thought this was a good idea?
“Who thought this was a good idea?”
They had to figure out a way to protect Lisa Murkowski.
Whatever it takes!
“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.”
— Petyr Baelish
Being complex, hard to tally is a feature. It makes cheating much more difficult to unravel. They are always changing rules to get Murkowski elected. Hopefully every Republican voter has had this explained to them and will not under any circumstances rank Murkowski. Trump should have endorsed multiple people I suppose.
It’s meant to select milk toast “moderates”.
Lots of out of state money pushed it. A number of Murkowski staffers pushed it.
It won with about a half a percent margin.
It was. From the beginning we nicknamed it the “Murkowski Protection Act.” The recent revelation that her own staff were instrumental in the campaign to get this passed only cemented that reality.
Murkowski and the GOPe. Tim Scott, Rick Scott among others sold out.
The GOPe and the rats. As much as anything it is intended to save Murkowski.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a Leftist construct, plain and simple.
If you ask someone to explain Ranked Choice Voting, they can’t. I would bet 98% of the people you ask on the street would be stumped.
But hey...it has the word “choice” in it, and WHO doesn’t like more “choice”, right?
In my opinion, all it does is make the already flawed and byzantine process even more flawed and byzantine.
Just for reference, Minneapolis adopted ranked choice cheating, for city elections, a while back. It seems to be working wonderfully for them (leftists).
Not this Alaskan
>> It might take weeks to tabulate
A runoff election would take longer—and cost more.
Either party can put fake candidates of the other party on the ballot to try and get their folks elected.
It's my opinion that more leftists run for office than those of us with jobs and families. So that pool will be dominated by those seeking public sector power: liberals. And while you may find your one conservative, the "well, he's good enough" candidate will get more votes because he's everyone's second or third choice.
Milk toast moderates: = Romney class politicians
Politicians that go along to get along and enrich themselves and live like royalty all while doing absolutely nothing positive for their constituents.
Bizarre that a state built on rugged individualism came up with this way of voting.
Alaskans did not come up with it, it was all funded and pushed by outside money. The premise was that it was going to remove dark money from elections… Most people didn’t research it and voted for it thinking they were getting rid of money from outside of our state.
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