By SUZANNE DOWNING | MUST READ ALASKA
Alaska is where political ideas can get beta tested and subsequently rolled out to the rest of the country. This goes back to 1975, just 16 years after statehood, when voters made Alaska the first state to legalize personal use of marijuana. It’s a cheap media market where voters are independent and persuadable.
The Rube Goldberg contraption that is Alaska’s new election system was adopted by voters after an aggressive campaign involving national dark money in 2020. With its various pulleys, levers, algorithms, machine-only counting, and no practical way to audit an election, it has added uncertainty and confusion to the voting process, and distrust in the results. It is also much more costly because it takes so much explanatory advertising by the Division of Elections.
This year, its intended results are being revealed, with a likely reelection of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and many Republican legislative candidates losing in the ranked choice system that is now in use.
The open primary ballot and ranked-choice voting general election also resulted in Alaska voting for a Bernie Sanders-style Democrat for Congress, even though barely 13.5% of Alaska voters are registered Democrats.
Nevada was next. Even before Alaska had a chance to show the rest of the world what a mess it had made of its election system, the combination of jungle primaries and ranked choice voting was on the Nevada ballot this Nov. 8, and passed 52.8% (latest count). A minor difference between the two systems is that in Nevada, the top five candidates emerging from the open primary would appear on the ranked-choice ballot in general elections, while in Alaska, it’s the top four candidates.
Yet, Nevada has a chance to reconsider its decision. In order to initiate the change required to enact a constitutional amendment in Nevada, this question need to be approved in two consecutive even-numbered election years. That means Ballot Measure 3 has to go back to the voters on Nov. 5, 2024. Then, the Legislature has to adopt it. And so the fight will go on in the Sagebrush State.
In Alaska and in Nevada, the system designed for progressives to control the outcomes was funded by mostly liberal dark money from outside the state.
Alaskans for Better Elections, started by Sen. Lisa Murkowski defenders, wrote the language for Alaska’s Ballot Measure 2, and was handed $7 million to market it. Most of the money came from Unite America ($3.4 million), Action Now Initiative ($2.9 million), and Represent.Us, which wrote, “Alaska’s elections are flooded with secret money, hindered by a lack of voter participation, and overshadowed by divisive politics. But together we can change what elections look like in Alaska by fighting to end the prevalence of dark money in the state’s elections, providing open primaries to all of Alaska’s voters, and implementing Ranked Choice Voting at the ballot box.”
On the other side, $600,000 was all that Defend Alaska Elections had to work with in 2020. The group didn’t have billionaires from outside the state helping, and Alaska business leaders who might pitch in to save the election system did not have the foresight to see that they were being played. Defend Alaska Elections lost its effort to prevent this disaster-by-design election system by just 3,781 votes. A sliver, but a loss nonetheless.
In Nevada, the forces for and against the ballot measure were similarly unbalanced: Nevada Votes First political action committee spent nearly $20 million. Top donors were Institute for Political Innovation founder Katherine Gehl, Action Now, Inc., GOP mega-donor Kenneth Griffin, liberal mega-donor Kathryn Murdoch, California real estate magnate John Sobrato, and Unite America.
The group opposed to the ballot question, Protect Your Vote Nevada political action committee, raised just $1.5 million. Top donors were Nevada Alliance, Majority Forward, and the Nevada Conservation League.
Under Nevada’s Ballot Measure 3, candidates would run in a single primary election, which is what Ballot Measure 2 gave Alaska in 2020, destroying the Alaska Republican Party’s ability to prevent Democrats from crashing their primary ballot and thus electing an unwinnable candidate for the Republicans to offer voters in the general election.
In a state that tends to go Republican, this open primary means there are more Republicans on the general election ballot and more discord among the candidates and their factions, which has proven to break down the party’s unity behind a candidate going into the general election. The Republican Party in Alaska has been badly hobbled by open primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Alaska’s election system has also slowed down the results to a snail’s pace. The final tabulation on the election doesn’t take place until Nov. 23, and certification is scheduled for Nov. 29. Legal challenges have four days to be filed. That puts the entire election into nearly a month after Nov. 8, Election Day.
Nevadans may wish to observe what is going on in Alaska. The fact that the Republican-leaning state to the North just elected a hard-left Democrat to Congress should tell Nevada voters everything they need to know about open primaries and ranked-choice voting. Nevadans ought to walk away from the betting table because this election gamble has the odds stacked against them.
Suzanne Downing is publisher of Must Read Alaska.
“One person, one vote.” is a common mantra, and is the basis for any system where representatives are elected in a democratic manner.
One person….
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One vote.
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Ranked choice voting destroys that.
It makes the system “One person, as many votes as needed.”
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Your first choice candidate does not come out on top, you get a second vote. If that candidate does not come out on top, you get a third vote. The AK ballot has four candidates, and a write in line. That means a voter that chooses poorly has up to four votes.
One person, one vote is dead in AK.
Re: “ ‘One person, one vote.’ is a common mantra, and is the basis for any system where representatives are elected in a democratic manner.”
To the contrary, forcing voters to only put a check mark next to the name of a single candidate on a ballot with more than two is most certainly NOT democratic, and often times fails. The plurality primary/general election system used for almost all elections in the US is so dysfunctional and undemocratic, it is basically broken. Allowing voters to give some opinion of every candidate on the ballot is essential to creating a voting system that much more consistently elects the most representative candidate. I do not like this top-four RCV system, but as flawed as it is, it is more democratic, more likely to elect the most preferred candidate, than the awful system it replaced.
How many times should I be allowed to vote?
Let’s say you ranked Peltola first, and I ranked Bye first. Bye is eliminated in the first round, so my second choice, Begich is now my vote. I just voted twice. Oh, but wait, Begich is eliminated in the second round, so my 3rd choice is now my voter. I just voted three times. Whereas, you only had one vote.
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Democratic, so it must be right. Democratic is better, always.
Or, it is mob rule.
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Let’s say 50% plus one vote decide to beat Brian Shank senseless, toss him into the inlet, and steal his entire net worth for “the common good.”
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You say the system is dysfunctional and undemocratic. I say pure democracy is nothing more than mob rule. We are both correct. You want to talk about broken, only 37% of the AK population wanted a Democrat to represent us in Congress, 60% wanted a Republican, but we got the Democrat because the open primary allowed more than one candidate to represent the Party.
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I do not want people to give opinions on all candidates, I want voters to vote for the person they want to represent them. The ballot is not where you express your opinion on all candidates, it is where you select the ONE candidate you think best represents your interests. End of story.
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It really is no different than selecting a soft drink from a vending machine. You can view all the choices, but you will only pay for one of them.
Re: ” I just voted three times.”
Instant runoff mimics a delayed runoff. In your example, I also voted three times; I just voted for the same candidate each time I went to the polls and voted.
Re: “democracy is nothing more than mob rule.”
Yes, I agree, but elections are not pure democracy. Our society and government should NOT be a pure democracy, mob rule system, but nonetheless, our elections should be as democratic as we can get them. The whole point of an election is to elect the most preferred candidate.
Re: “I do not want people to give opinions on all candidates, I want voters to vote for the person they want to represent them.”
How are we supposed to avoid vote-splitting creating a spoiler scenario? If we force voters to pick only one candidate, and no candidate gets more than 50%, there is no way to know who is the most preferred candidate.
Re: Two Republicans collectively received about 60%, yet a Democrat won…
Generally, there is nothing illegitimate about this type of an election outcome in a state with so many independents. Fewer people identify with either major party in Alaska than any other state. On the other hand, that particular RCV election suffered a spoiler scenario, and Begich was the most preferred candidate. That type of failure appears to be rare for RCV.
“Instant runoff mimics a delayed runoff. In your example, I also voted three times; I just voted for the same candidate each time I went to the polls and voted.”
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Mimics? Not even close. First of all, with a delayed run off, there are typically only two candidates. Not four. Yes, I am including write ins as candidates. So, not mimicking there.
Also, with a delayed run off, the two highest vote getting candidates get to campaign. They get to tell the voters again why they are the best choice. Again, not mimicking in any way.
Finally, instant run-off voting does not allow a voter to re-evaluate their choice in any way. It has all the drawbacks of early voting without any of the perks. Again, totally different than delayed run off.
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“How are we supposed to avoid vote-splitting creating a spoiler scenario? If we force voters to pick only one candidate, and no candidate gets more than 50%, there is no way to know who is the most preferred candidate.”
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The most preferred candidate is the one that gets the most votes. Simple. A child can understand it. No need for RCV. If there are 10 candidates, and the winner gets 11% of the votes, they are the most preferred candidate.
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“…and Begich was the most preferred candidate….”
OK, you have convinced me that you are delusional. At what point did Begich get more votes than Sarah Palin or Mary Peltola? Nick Begich was 3rd place out of 3 in the special election, and 3rd place out of four in this one. How does that translate into “preferred candidate?”
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You have convinced me of, well… nothing, actually. In fact, I am even more convinced that RCV is significantly worse for the population as a whole after your response.
Another reason why RCV does not “mimic” a delayed run off. With RCV, let’s say I rank three of the four candidates, and my top two ranked candidates did not make it to the last round. I lose the ability to re-assess my vote because the run off is instant. Had I known which two candidates would be in the last round, I may have voted differently. This is exactly what happens in a conventional run off.
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Take the last Anchorage Mayor’s race. Several candidates ran, no one got more than 45% of the vote. So, the two candidates with the most votes ran off. I voted for neither of them, so now, I have the chance to participate in the electoral process in the run off. Whereas, under RCV, I either have to rank all candidates, even the ones I would never want to see in office, or I lose that chance.
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Talk about disenfranchising voters. Pretend you are giving them more choices, while in fact limiting their participation on the election process.
There is no difference between delayed runoff and instant runoff with regard to how your vote is counted. Your belief that I had only one vote and you had three is ludicrous. With instant or delayed runoff, your vote for one candidate and only one candidate is counted in any election round.
Correct, there is no difference between the two when it comes to how the votes are counted.
The difference is in how the votes are cast.
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By the way, you are pretty adamant this is a great system. How long have you been working with Alaskans for Better Elections? And, exactly how much of your funding it from outside of AK?
Re: “At what point did Begich get more votes than Sarah Palin or Mary Peltola?”
When looking at ALL of the ranking data, we can plainly tell that Begich was preferred over Peltola and was also preferred over Palin.
See numbers below:
11290 Begich only
27053 Begich > Palin > Peltola
15467 Begich > Peltola > Palin
53810 Total Begich-first ballots
21080 Palin only
34208 Palin > Begich > Peltola
3685 Palin > Peltola > Begich
58973 Total Palin-first ballots
23579 Peltola only
47504 Peltola > Begich > Palin
4716 Peltola > Palin > Begich
75799 Total Peltola-first ballots
Pairwise comparisons:
Begich (101,314) > Palin (63,689) [Begich wins with 61%]
Begich (88,018) > Peltola (79,484) [Begich wins with 53%]
Peltola (91,266) > Palin (86,026) [Peltola wins with 51%]
Begich > Peltola > Palin
If you refuse to plainly look at the basic concept that plurality voting CANNOT provide enough information from the voters to determine who is the most preferred candidate (unless one candidate receives more than 50%), then my only hope is that others will read my comments and understand this concept.
Begich was eliminated in the first round.
Therefore, his first choice votes are gone. They cease to count. For ballot tabulating purposes, Begich is no longer a candidate after he is eliminated, and the people ranking him first have their 2nd choice votes moved to 1st.
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Nope, not buying it. Bummer, but Begich was not the preferred candidate, regardless of how you twist the counting. RCV made sure of it.
Since you want to equate a delayed run off with RCV, I will stick with that analogy, and further demonstrate that Nick Begich was not in any way the preferred candidate.
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in a conventional run off election, you do not add the votes a candidate gets in the general election, and the run off election together. A candidate moving to a run off starts fresh. Zero votes.
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And, that is another strike against RCV. If this is a “run off” why do some candidates get to keep some votes, and other candidates have their 1st rank votes removed? Hint: it is because the entire system is faulty, and should never be implemented anywhere people want fair elections.
“Begich was not the preferred candidate, regardless of how you twist the counting. RCV made sure of it.”
Trouble is that RCV, or instant runoff, ignores a lot of the votes, and thus suffered a spoiler scenario in this case. It’s RCV that is twisting the counting. The correct way of counting the votes is extremely simple. We just look at each ballot to see if a voter ranked Begich higher than Palin, or Palin higher than Begich. Did more voters rank Begich higher or Palin higher? More voters obviously ranked Begich higher. So RCV screwed Alaska and Republicans out of a seat they should have won. This type of failure is why I am not fan of RCV. For 15 years, I’ve been trying to convince people NOT to use RCV.
“… ignores a lot of the votes,…”
No, it does not.
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It counts them. And, when a candidate has the least number of first rank votes, they are eliminated, and that ballot’s 2nd ranked choice becomes the first ranked one. This is according to the Department of Elections.
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See, they are not ignored, they are counted, then thrown into the trash because the candidate did not get enough to make it to the next round of ranking.
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The “correct” way you describe is not what RCV does, therefore, it is NOT correct.
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And, for 15 years you have been trying to convince people not to use RCV? Could have fooled me. Every comment you have in response is an advertisement for RCV.
One more question:
What makes you think a 3rd choice/rank vote for Nick Begich means he is the preferred candidate?
If we assume, as you are, that plurality votes can be taken at face value, then why not just assume that Peltola is the most preferred candidate? Why ask Palin or Begich to drop out, and why blame either one of them for anything? In that special election, Peltola received 40% of the vote while Palin only received 31% and Begich 28%. Any suggestion that either Palin or Begich needs to drop out automatically identifies vote-splitting as a serious problem, and thus throws doubt on the value of all those first-place rankings which are plurality votes.
Why assume one should drop out, but at the same time rely on faulty vote-totals corrupted by vote-splitting as a means to decide who drops out? Keep in mind that had Palin been eliminated first, a Republican would have been elected, and would quite possibly hold the seat for the next two years as well. This incorrect use of first-place vote totals in this particular RCV election has stolen a congressional seat from Republicans.
“In that special election, Peltola received 40% of the vote while Palin only received 31% and Begich 28%.”
That means Peltola won. And, while I do not like that, it is not my preferred outcome, it is the outcome of the election, and I will live with it.
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Keep in mind that even if we did not have RCV, and these stupid jungle/open primaries, there is a good possibility that Peltola, Begich, and Palin could have been on the ballot. Peltola would have been the Dem, and either Palin or Begich the Republican, and there is absolutely nothing stopping the other from running as the Green Party nominee, or any other 3rd party. Or as a write in. Which means, the votes would be split among the conservatives, and Peltola would have won.
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Now, let me be 100% clear here.
Second ranked votes have not value. They should not exist. End of story. When I am voting, I am selecting the candidate I want to be in office, NOT saying “oh… if this person loses, I guess this other person will be OK.” Reality: My first rank is the person I want to win the election. Any other ranking is deciding which is the least worse.
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And, again. What exactly makes you think a third rank vote for Begich should be counted as a “preferred” vote?
Re: “What makes you think a 3rd choice/rank vote for Nick Begich means he is the preferred candidate?”
From what it is worth, Begich appears to have received fewer last place (i.e., third place) votes than either Peltola or Begich, and thus appears to be the most preferred candidate, but it’s hard to be sure of that. We have the same general problem for counting third place votes as we have for determining who is the most preferred candidate based on single plurality votes. We don’t have enough information from the voters. We cannot legitimately count the number of third place votes because voters were not required to rank all candidates, or all but one candidate.
Seriously, you are obviously a fan of RCV, and of Nick Begich.
But, neither explains why you think 2nd or lower rankings matter. Do you think that every base you touch in a baseball game counts as a point? Do you think the number of home team jerseys in the stands for a NFL game makes a difference in who gets the points?
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If RCV worked they way you seem to think it works, we would know who won on election night. All they have to do is count up the number of marks made for a candidate, regardless of ranking, and the person with the most marks is elected.
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That is not the way it works. Ranking removes the first rank votes from the person who has the least, and promotes the 2nd ranking votes on that ballot to 1st ranking. Begich may have moved the football for hundreds of yards, but never scored a point. Yet, here you are, claiming it means something.
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Bummer, your candidate lost. Deal with it, and stop blaming others for the loss. If Begich had a better campaign and appealed to more voters he woulld have been ahead of Palin on the first counting, not behind BOTH times.
Either play within the rules of the game, or do not play.
Re: that write-in candidate vote-splitter
Again, the vote-splitting problem still rears its ugly head. Could you please fix that?!
Peltola winning via a spoiler scenario is NOT okay! It’s unacceptable! That’s a failure of what an election is supposed to do, which is elect the most preferred candidate.
Nope. No way to get rid of the vote splitter. Not going to happen in any kind of election system where write in votes are allowed. Closed primaries will go a long way because it will ensure only one candidate will run for any party as their nominee. But, the write in… until that goes away, you will have splitting. Talk to the people representing you in Juneau. I am sure they will get rid of write in votes because you do not like the person who won. Good luck.
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Bummer. Peltola won. Perhaps if you got your boy to review the results of the special election under the rules of RCV, instead of your magical thinking method, he would have realized how badly he did in the special and stepped aside. But, nope, all you Palin haters distorted the marks on ballots as meaningful, instead of considering what RCV paid attention to, and he stayed in the race, thinking that if the person who came in 2nd just got out of the way, he could win.
Thanks for screwing over AK. The Democrats appreciate your assistance.
The first vote is the only “preferred” candidate. After that it is merely “least objectionable”, which is the opposite of truly representative.
If a candidate wants to win they need to make their message palatable to a plurality of the people who bother to vote, which includes having a message that brings out more people to support them to create that plurality. There is nothing magic about the arbitrary 50%+1.
You guys have had an interesting conversation on this, but I have a few comments to add.
RCV is not *exactly* like a series of runoff votes, but it is *similar*. Yes, you have to decide up front who your second (and third, etc) choice would be if your first choice is eliminated, and correct, there is no additional time for the candidates to further torture the public with their ads, or for voters to change their minds on subsequent rounds. However it is faster and cheaper to administer than a series of runoff votes, and it is more likely to yield a winner with a larger amount of support than plurality elections. And yes, runoff elections are typically only between the top two vote getters, but that’s more of a limitation than a good feature, because the top two vote getters might only be preferred by small minorities of voters, even if they are the plurality winners. Eliminating just one candidate at a time on each round is a much more accurate read of the will of the voters. It would be way too expensive and time-consuming to have actual elections to do that, and what’s more, the turnout would be much smaller, so the results would not reflect public sentiment as well.
RCV is like a series of runoff votes in that the voters get a chance to express an opinion on each round. This is still “one person, one vote”, just like a series of runoffs would be. That is the way in which it is similar, even though it is not exactly the same thing. You’re right that your second and lower choices do not count at all until your first choice is eliminated, and this is how it should be! If it wasn’t that way, any positive vote for anyone other than your first choice could hurt your first choice’s chances.
What’s so great about someone winning a 10-candidate race with 11% of the vote? That’s terrible, if everyone else hates that candidate and the rest of the candidates were similar enough to split the vote.
It’s useless to look at all the preferences among all of the voters’ 2nd, 3rd, and lower choices. You have to think of it as being like a series of runoffs (not exactly the same, just like it in certain ways!). If Republicans wanted to make sure they elected one of theirs to Congress, they should have put the other Republican as their second choice. That would have taken advantage of RCV’s built-in system for eliminating vote splitting. Since that didn’t happen, the vote was split. That’s not RCV’s problem.
Plurality voting already forces people to choose the “least worst” alternative, because you have to be strategic to avoid vote splitting. Recall the effect of Ross Perot running in 1992? Or, arguably, Ralph Nader in 2000? And voters who vote for losers in elections are always “disenfranchised”, that’s not a unique feature of RCV. It’s less of a problem in RCV, but it can’t be avoided, because some people will not get any of their preferences elected. Tough! That’s how it goes. To me one of the good things about RCV is that it lets you vote more honestly instead of strategically. Is it perfect? No, no voting system can be. But it’s a heck of a lot better than single round plurality elections that can be won by a marginal candidate who only represents a small minority of the voters.
RCV does not favor one party or another, it favors candidates who appeal to a larger constituency. Nobody wants mob rule, but majority rule (with minority rights), or as close to it as you can get, is still the fundamental idea of democratic government. Why is minority rule (the frequent result of plurality elections) preferable to that?
why can’t we reverse RCV with another ballot measure in 2024?
What in this last election makes you think we can pull that off?
We are a left of center state. And they left never relinquishes power.
Because nobody within the state ‘deep state’ political establishment wishes to overturn it. Rank Choice Voting serves the sociopathic powers-that-be, so you can expect any challenges to it to be vehemently fought by those most vested in obtaining and exercising political power.
Will be easier to have the State Legislature pass a bill changing it versus ballot measure. Flood your Representatives and Senators email with the request to enact legislation to reverse this debacle.
I’m not a fan of RCV, but if I were a legislator, I would be hesitant to vote to overturn a measure that voters had approved (whether it might be a good idea or not).
Bad test.
The issue is not whether the voters approved it, but whether the result is good or bad. I know this is a stupid argument to the absurd, but….
If the voters approved public executions for minor offenses like parking tickets, would you, as a legislator, be reluctant to overturn it?
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The effect of the ballot measure must be considered, not just “50%+” voted for it.
I have heard rumors that is already in the works
We can and should!
I thought ballot measure could be overridden by the legislature after two years?
Why wait until 2024? This needs to occur next year in 2023. The 2-year period after approval of Ballot Measure 2 in of the 2020 General Election adoption has just expired.
RCV worked exactly as intended from the start. It will be rolled out to as many states as possible. It will succeed in creating a pseudo legal voting system which empowers the progressives for the next 50 years.
Helen Keller could have seen this, but Alaska somehow didn’t? Hard to believe.
The sad, sorry truth is America is not a conservative country. It is left of center. And slides further every day.
If we were logical people, the Democrats would have lost seats in historic fashion. The last two years of been a economic and social collapse and the voters said “more, please”
The first step in dealing with this is acknowledging the reality. Know when you’re in the minority.
I’ve been asked why I continue to point out Porcaro’s pivotal role in the abomination. Simple. His actions are classic to why we are here.
A man who arguably knew better teamed up with the single sleaziest person in Alaska politics. Why? Money? Ego? Make nice with the new power in Alaska?
God knows why, but we all are living the result. Last I heard he still is reluctant to own his roll in this.
But while he deserves a large share of the blame (again, he should have known better), he’s not the only dirty party here.
How many Alaskans didn’t bother to vote? How long have we tolerated dolts like Tuckerman Babcock screwing over the right via incompetence? How many bothered to learn the system before voting? How many studied their district candidates to make an informed decision?
We are where we are because a mix of unicorn thinking and denial of reality got us here.
This is why RCV is not going anywhere and the country keeps sliding to the left.
Exactly correct. All of it.
Or can the legislature reverse RCV in two years? Legislative action would be quicker than a new petition, signature gatherers, counting signatures, and a new vote.
The legislature just elected will not act. It is quite soft. – sd
You still can just vote for one person. Like how I voted just for Mary Peltola and NOT Palin or Begich.
Very true.
However, that fails when more than one candidate is representing a major political party. If there were two Democrat candidates, would you only have ranked one of them?
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Gaming the system is supposed to be tougher than that.
How do we get rid of ranked choice voting?
You don’t get rid of it …won’t happen anymore than we were able to get rid of it here in Maine (the first state to implement this RCV nonsense) so trust me…SADLY you are stuck with it! Why you guys did this to yourselves is beyond me given that you could plainly see what (predictably) happened here in the Pine Tree State in 2020. All it does is elect Democrats up here as designed. Good luck getting rid of it ….I do wish you well in this but don’t hold your breath.
“……It’s a cheap media market where voters are independent and persuadable……..”
It’s a tiny state voter pool of just a couple hundred thousand voters. Propaganda money goes a long way.
Can ‘persuadable’ be translated as “easy to manipulate”?
RCV, as I have pointed out before is an easy and legal way to set two lesser candidates to ambush a stronger candidate. Thus, there were two targets. Maintain Murkowski (but she ran as a write-in before and won, so why go to this extreme?), and defeat Mike Dunleavy. Walker exposed his hate when he would not even shake hands with the guv after the debate, and Walker’s (former?) chief of staff kept suing Dunleavy over anything he could dream up for most of Dunleavy’s first term. In addition to RCV the dems country-wide had the financial assistance of a Cryptocurrency so-called billionaire who evidently took his investors’ money to mostly fund the democrat races. He started this company in 2018 (another election year) and finally busted it right after 2022, after dumping more billions than even Soros into the fray. How much did the Permanent Fund lose? And no outcry from Scott Kendall and his “group.” Between RCV and these Ponzi schemes, when will the public learn?
One vote: one skank.
Too bad about the U.S. elections. Actually, though, I am very surprised that the Republicans managed to get control of the House; I was expecting them to lose everything. The Democrats have been working for years on making “vote by mail” a major way of voting because it is so easy for them to corrupt (they perfected those and other techniques long ago in the big Dem cities), and I figured that ALL the important races (at least all of those that include the big Dem cities) would be fixed to provide just enough margin to ensure the Dem victories. So, I actually must admit that I am surprised the Republicans at least marginally prevailed in the House. But with such a slim margin, they will be hugely hampered by RINOs. And, speaking of RINOs, we will have Lisa Murkowski for another 6 years for Alaska as well as a Democrat replacing Don Young in the House all because of Murkowski’s ploy to change the Alaska election process to “ranked voting” a couple of years ago with huge amounts of “outside” funding selling it to the naive Alaska electorate.
If Murkowski is indeed the most preferred candidate of all candidates running, it makes no sense to suggest we should use a voting system that elects Tshibaka. Party primaries, particularly closed ones, are far and away more likely to malfunction and place the wrong candidate into office relative to any other cause of malfunction like voter fraud, photo ID requirement, human error in counting vote totals, machine error, etc. The primaries are the most dysfunctional and warped aspect of our voting system, and yet many people appear to be holding them up as if they are some sort of a gold standard.
RCV is not a scheme to elect liberals or to cheat. Primaries are indeed very terrible, and need to be abolished. We cannot do that fairly or correctly without first abolishing the vote-splitting problem which is the number one reason primaries came into existence. Plurality voting is destructive; throw it into the trashcan!
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