The Alaska Democratic Party issued a fundraising email over the weekend that all-but admits that ranked choice voting helps their candidate and hurts Republicans. They were dismayed that Nancy Dahlstrom dropped from the November ballot, and described it as an event that makes things tighter for Peltola.
The Democrats make it clear in their fundraising pitch that they didn’t want Mary Peltola to have to face Nick Begich without Nancy Dahlstrom draining votes, volunteers, and campaign contributions from him. The ranked choice system works for them, they’ve seen. “Things just got even closer!” was the subject line of the Democrats’ pitch for donations:
When ranked-choice voting was first on the ballot in 2020, the Alaska Democratic Party opposed it publicly. But the party has seen how it works well for them in a state where there are multiple candidates on the Republican side, but where they can discipline their candidates to not compete against fellow Democrats — especially their incumbents.
This “things got closer” narrative is counter to the Democrats’ public proclamation that ranked-choice voting is good for all, no matter what their political affiliation.
Republicans outnumber Democrats in Alaska two to one, but with Alaska’s new open primary, there were four Republicans on the ballot for Congress. Ranked-choice voting robbed the Republicans from being able to advance their own candidates through a semi-open process they had before, where only Republicans or voters not affiliated with an actual party could help choose the Republican candidates for the general election.
Peltola in August was competing against a mostly conservative group of 11 other candidates, and she barely got more than 50% in an election that was largely ignored by voters — only 108,906 of 605,482Â registered voters voted, for a turnout of 17.99%.
To be clear, with Alaska’s voter rolls inflated, the actual voter base could be less than 575,000 (based on the fact that in 2018, there were 566,790 registered voters in a population that was officially 736,624, and the state’s population has shrunk since then by about 3,000 and there are about 132,044 school-aged children in Alaska). But even if the actual voting base is 575,000 the turnout was still only about 19%.
Yet it’s clear the Democrats got their voters out, since they vastly over performed, having used a unified message around just one candidate. Republicans were splintered between two for the primary, but will not be hampered as much in the general election.
2024’s primary will go down — technically — as the third least-voted since 1974, but only because of the inflated voter rolls. The standing is muddy: What’s not available in the calculation is whether earlier years’ voter rolls were equally as inaccurate as the current claim that there are 605,482 actual living, eligible voters in Alaska.
On Nov. 5, voters will have an opportunity to get rid of ranked-choice voting with a “yes” vote on Ballot Measure 2.
