We are gathering signatures on a petition to repeal ranked choice voting (RCV.) This is not the first time we have tried this. We completed a petition in time to vote on the question in the fall of 2024 and it failed by a handful of votes.
I wrote a My Turn on the subject last time that was focused on why Republicans are victims of RCV and that Democrats — who favored creation of RCV — are the beneficiaries of the system. This time, I want to focus on why the ordinary voter, whether an active party member or not, should hold RCV in low regard.
RCV is just not natural or comfortable for voters with experience in the conventional, tried-and-true system. You went to the polling station, voted for the person you liked the best (or disliked the least) and went home to learn the result of the election that evening. With RCV, you are encouraged to rank the top four candidates from who you like the most to the who you like the least. Then you wait for two or three weeks while the Division of Elections (currently staffed by entirely competent people stuck with a lousy process to count) run their computers over and over again to finally determine a winner.
RCV is based on gullibility and trickery. It is not natural to be asked to vote for someone you do not like and that you would not vote for at all in a normal election process. Republicans figured it out in time to mount a “Rank-the-Red” campaign for 2022 encouraging their members to only vote for Sarah Palin or Nick Begich and not to vote for any others but it did not work. The key is who you vote for first. Palin and Begich split those top line votes and the Democrat won.
The result in 2024 would have been the same but the second-place Republican, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dalstrom, heroically withdrew. It should also be noted that in 2024, the RCV system enabled a Democrat candidate who was a convicted felon in a New York prison, to appear on the final four general election ballot. That could not have happened under the old system.
The final criticism of RCV is that the public, including political parties cannot participate in a recount. Before RCV, a recount included the re-processing of ballots by machine (not a computer, just a ballot-reading machine that is not connected to any network) and if that was unsatisfying, it could be done by hand. Either way, the public could be physically present to observe the process. With RCV, we must trust the Division of Elections’ RCV computer algorithms and operators and there is no third party to audit the polling.
You may be inclined to say “C’mon man, we voted in 2024 to keep it, what is different now?” Well, 320,985 Alaskans voted in that election and the repeal failed by just 737 votes. A lot of people were confused. The Vote No on the repeal campaign spent $13 million dollars of mostly dark, outside money. The Vote Yes campaign never got off the ground. They were outspent 100-1 and lawyered into oblivion by the Vote No campaign. This time, we have highly skilled leaders, more resources and very motivated campaign workers.
We can do this but we still need signatures. You can help by going to www.repealnowak.com to contribute money. We are gathering signatures on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons on the corner across from Costco. If that does not work for you, send an email repealnowalaska@gmail.com and we will send someone to you. Thanks for getting involved.
• Walsh is a retired land use consultant living in Juneau.
