By HAYDEN LUDWIG
Credit Georgia Republicans for seeing the light: Ranked-choice voting is a trojan horse for flipping red states blue and must be banned immediately.
“Ranked-choice voting is designed to cause confusion and fatigue among voters,” Lt. Gov. Burt Jones recently observed, adding that “this type of voting system [is] pushed by dark money groups.” The Senate agrees, advancing a bill (SB 355) that would ban ranked-choice voting (RCV) in Georgia.
Jones is right on the money, indeed. RCV is pushed by a coalition of leftist groups, chief among them the Maryland-base FairVote, which also aims to abolish the Electoral College and lower the voting age to 16.
Not coincidentally, those policies are also supported by National Popular Vote—the leading anti-Electoral College group—and Rock the Vote, which juices the Democratic youth vote. In fact, both FairVote and Rock the Vote endorsed congressional Democrats’ bill lowering the voting age last year.
It’s no mystery why these sorts of terrible ideas have the same backers. Leftists view RCV as a weapon for conquering red states, which is why they work hard to keep RCV out of Democrat-run Washington, D.C. In May 2023, the D.C. Democratic Party voted against adopting RCV because they feared it would “undermine the strength of Democrats” in the district.
(RELATED: Here’s the Left’s Playbook for Rigging Elections in 2024)
Contrast that with the Left’s support for RCV in Maine and Alaska. Republican candidates won more votes in Maine’s 2018 election and Alaska’s 2022 election—yet both red states sent Democrats to Congress under their ranked-choice voting laws.
That’s because RCV confuses voters, leading to thousands of ballots being trashed—8,000 in Maine and 15,000 in Alaska, respectively. Each one represents a disenfranchised voter. No wonder FairVote brags that its election “reforms” would clinch 2 more Democrat congressional seats in Georgia.
Instead of casting a ballot for a single candidate per office, as Americans have done for centuries, RCV tasks voters with voting for every candidate on the ballot, dramatically complicating a responsible voter’s pre-election research. That might mean stacking as many as 5 candidates on a 1–5 scale beginning with your top pick, many of whom will likely represent the same party and split the Republican vote—as happened in Alaska in 2022.
Tabulators take those results and run through a series of rounds, with each round dropping off the lowest vote-getter until the final candidate is declared the winner. Confused yet?
Understandably, many voters decline to fill in more than 1 or 2 bubbles, and so their ballots are trashed as more rounds continue. Is that fair? Only if you’re a Democrat operative trying to flip red states.
We’ve traced big grants to FairVote from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, hedge fund billionaire John Arnold, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Tides Foundation. These are the biggest “progressive” mega-donors in America; they only cut checks to political groups they believe will secure Democrat victories.
Alaska’s pro-RCV ballot measure in 2020 was overwhelmingly bankrolled by outside “dark money” interests, who outspent conservatives 3–1 yet won by fewer than 3,800 votes. One of the top donors was Unite America, which has supported RCV campaigns in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Nevada, Arizona, Maine, Oklahoma, and dozens of municipalities.
You can bet that this “dark money” machine will dig deep to fight Alaskans’ campaign to repeal RCV in November 2024.
Alaska may be fighting an uphill battle, but Georgia Republicans still have an opportunity to save their state when the RCV ban goes to the Senate floor. Republicans, do what’s right for Georgia and ban ranked-choice voting.
Hayden Ludwig writes for Restoration of America, where this column first appeared.
It is interesting to note that in one-party Democrat regimes, such as California, there is NO organized push for statewide rank choice voting. Now just why might that be?
They already have communism.
This is the description of Alaskans for Better Elections profile. What a crock!!! They ARE the dark $. Don’t let them fool you twice!
“More than 173k Alaskans voted to end dark money, create open primaries, and implement ranked-choice voting to make our election system work for ALL voters!”
Patricia, ranked-choice voting is the greatest fraud ever perpetrated upon Alaskan voters. Repeal RCV!
The Constitution establishes one (1) vote for one man not four (4) votes for one man.
Logically speaking, why should the incumbents ditch a plan that makes re- election a virtual certainty?
Please don’t be naive and say because the voters want them to. When has that mattered?
I would like to remind everyone again, the RCV ballot measure was losing badly at the end of the day in 2020, and it was a slug of absentee ballots that took it the other way. I do not believe absentee voters would vote that differently from in person voters.
Ranked Choice Voting – the fallback for when the other Democrat designed voting fraud schemes aren’t enough to guarantee a liberal win.
Proving that just because you wear a tie doesn’t mean you’re smart.
It’s the nefarious marriage of RCV PLUS an open primary that makes Alaska’s elections so sickening.
The party which winds up with the least number of candidates on the final 4 person ballot always wins (remember Al Gross getting out too late to put another democrat on the ballot?)
Our current system is a sick trick to promote big machine politics and heavy outside money. What the citizens want is unimportant.
More Alaskans voted for a republican than a democrat U.S. Representative in 2022. But we wound up with a democrat.
The rich movers and shakers laugh at our stupidity. All they had to do was give their outfit a misleading name, buy some TV spots, recruit a talk show host and – voila! We’re blue.
Agreed!
The entity you forgot is our AK supreme court. According to law, ballot initiatives have to be single subject items. RCV passed on the “dark money” provision and for no other reason, as most were dubious about RCV. The two should have been on separate ballot initiatives, as one deals with the voting process and the other with funding mechanisms. Sadly our politically charged supreme court once again (remember Walker and the PFD) put their fat fingers on the scale and ignored the law as written. In the end I hold them most responsible, as with two individual initiatives it is my belief that RCV would not have passed and we would have either Nick or Sarah in Mary’s seat today.
“It’s the nefarious marriage of RCV PLUS an open primary that makes Alaska’s elections so sickening. The party which winds up with the least number of candidates on the final 4 person ballot always wins”
This is simply false. If there was one D and three R’s on the ballot, and the voters who would prefer an R listed the other R’s as their 2nd and 3rd choices, and if the D had the most 1st place votes, one of the R’s would collect all those R votes. Then if there were more R votes total than D votes the R would win. It is failure of R voters to rank the other R’s that is the problem. That’s what happened when Peltola won. Half the votes for Begich either didn’t list anyone in 2nd place or listed Peltola. RCV makes vote splitting LESS likely not more, but only if you use it to your advantage.
That said I am not a fan of the top four primary either, the way it is done in AK. I would rather there was no primary or the top four were also selected by RCV, which would mean they would be the candidates with the broadest support.
Another clear illustration of why our founders wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights to create our nation as a Republic where the rights of the minority are to be as important as the rights of the majority. Examples of pure democracy are gang rape and lynch mobs. The recipient has little to nothing to say about the matter.
Mob rule.
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