By a slim margin in 2020, Alaskans voted by ballot initiative to adopt ranked choice voting. Tuesday, Aug. 16, marked the first use of ranked choice voting for Alaska’s special election for the state’s only House of Representatives seat after the death of Rep. Don Young (R-AK).
In traditional elections, each voter selects one candidate. Under Alaska’s ranked choice voting system, voters rank their preference of candidates out of four. From the early results of Alaska’s House race, no candidate won a clear 50-percent-plus-one majority after the first round of counting. This means that votes for the lowest-scoring candidate, or in this case the write-in votes, will be eliminated, and second choices will be counted in the second round of tabulation. This cycle will continue until a candidate arrives at a majority.
Although liberals extol ranked choice voting as an appealing alternative to the status quo, it’s actually a disaster in disguise.
Explainer videos make ranked choice voting seem so simple that it could have been invented by the mayor from Paw Patrol, but ranked choice voting is best known for being ridiculously and unnecessarily complicated. Ranked choice voting jurisdictions have higher rates of voter error compared to traditional plurality elections. In practice, this tends to discourage first-time and low-information voters from completing their ballots correctly or from ranking all the candidates on their ballots, meaning that many votes will not actually be counted.
Part of this voter confusion comes from the need to rank all candidates on the ballot. Although voters are not explicitly required to cast a vote for all four candidates, ranking all the candidates on the ballot, even those they do not support, would be the only way to ensure a vote is counted in every round of tabulation.
Additionally, calculating the results of ranked choice voting elections is a quagmire. Because of multiple runoff tabulations, ranked choice voting ballots across the state must be transported to a centralized location for counting, which experts contend makes elections more vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement. Counting ranked choice voting ballots in Alaska is an even greater challenge than usual because transporting ballots to the capital, Juneau, is only possible by plane or cargo ship.
The results from ranked choice voting elections are rarely available on Election Day because of these tabulation troubles. In fact, Alaska’s second round of counting for the Aug. 16 election will not even begin until Aug. 31, and the final tally could take an additional several weeks, as it has in many state and local jurisdictions that use ranked choice voting. With faith in the democratic process already hanging on the precipice, even minor delays in delivering results can engender more mistrust.
Keep in mind, too, that until this seat is filled, Alaskans are not being represented in Congress, making the delay caused by ranked choice voting even more detrimental.
But the ranked choice voting nightmare only gets worse.
Ranked choice voting claims to protect majority rule, but in reality, ranked choice voting merely creates an artificial majority. One study of elections in Maine found that, of 98 recent ranked choice voting elections, 60% of ranked choice voting victors did not win with a majority of the total votes cast. By the final round of one San Francisco local election, more ballots had been thrown out than were counted toward the winner’s total.
We don’t need to wait for Alaska’s results to come in to know that ranked choice voting is a danger to state election integrity and voter confidence. So far, only Alaska and Maine have adopted ranked choice voting for all elections, but the liberal push for ranked choice voting is gaining strength. To combat this, state governments in Florida and Tennessee have prohibited ranked choice voting for all races, strengthening the integrity of elections in their states. Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed attempts to implement ranked choice voting at the state level. Voters in Massachusetts also rejected it by a wide margin in a 2020 statewide referendum.
Alaska’s experiment will prove to be folly, but we don’t need to learn from their experience to stop the nationwide ranked choice voting disaster before it starts.
Gabrielle M. Etzel is a senior research fellow for the Foundation for Government Accountability.
