Alaska Can Help Save Democracy By Eliminating Ranked-Choice Voting

The new home of ranked-choice voting: the deep freezer.

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This November Alaska can help save democracy in America.

These days our heated political environment is loaded with cries that American democracy is in danger. The two major parties and countless officeholders and candidates and political groups are accused of threatening the existence of the American republic. Much, though not all, of this perfervid rhetoric can be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

But there is a danger lurking out there that hasn’t received much attention recently and would, if it became widespread, pervert our elections. It’s called ranked-choice voting (RCV).

Normally, a candidate wins an election if she or he wins the most votes. Some states and localities have provisions for run-offs if no candidate passes a certain threshold, usually 50% of the vote. However, ranked-choice voting turns this straightforward approach upside down. Under this scheme, voters don’t just vote for their preferred candidate but also rank other names on the ballot in order of preference—second choice, third choice and so on. If no candidate gets 50% or more of the ballots cast, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and his votes are distributed to the second-choice picks. The process goes on until someone reaches 50%.

Maine, Alaska, Washington, D.C. and a number of localities use this system. Moreover, Democrats allow states to use RCV for their presidential primaries. Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Nevada and Wyoming did so in 2020, and they and others will probably do so in 2028. Of course, there was no contest for the party’s presidential candidate in 2024.

The results of ranked-choice voting have been perverse. Candidates without a whole lot of support end up winning. In 2022 in the red state of Alaska a Democrat won a special race for the House of Representatives. In a normal election she would have lost to a Republican. The same thing happened in Maine.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this system can be gamed if secondary votes are deliberately cast to help other candidates. That’s what happened a few days ago in the Alaska primary, when ads were run for a non-serious candidate without his knowledge because it was felt this would assist another candidate.

Alaska results take days to tabulate, in no small part because of the numerous candidates running for various offices. This highlights another fault of RCV: candidate fatigue among voters.

Many on the far-left love ranked-choice voting because they see it as a way to promote candidates who could never win in a straightforward election. They believe New York’s system of RCV was very helpful in electing the once-obscure Zohran Mamdani as mayor. They are going to push for ranked-choice voting for the rest of the country, even though the idea has been rejected in certain state initiatives.

Fortunately, Alaska can help American democracy. There’s a referendum there in November to abolish its RCV system, and Alaskans would do us all an immense favor by dumping it in the deep freezer.