By SUZANNE DOWNING
One consequence of the new ranked choice voting system in Alaska is that voters will probably not know for at least 15 days who will be the winner of the congressional race. That’s because, by law, the absentee ballots and overseas ballots have 15 days to get back to the Division of Elections.
And it’s because ranked choice voting seizes up the system until those mailed-in ballots are in.
In a normal election, it would usually be obvious who is ahead and whether the votes yet to be counted would be enough to change the outcome. As the overseas votes trickle in, they add to the totals and the ratios between candidates become evermore clear.
But with the misnomered “instant runoff” of the ranked choice voting system, there’s a built in delay because of the second and third round of counting. There’s nothing instant about it.
After the first round of counting is done on Election Night, Aug. 16, Alaskans will probably not be able to know who is eliminated in the first round of counting among the three candidates: Mary Peltola-D, Nick Begich-R, or Sarah Palin-R. They’ll only have a sense of the outcome if the result on Election Night is overwhelmingly for one of the candidates, and if one of the candidates lags far, far behind. That is unlikely in the three-way election for the temporary seat in Congress, where Peltola, Begich, and Palin could all get a fairly equal number of votes.
After all the votes are in two weeks later, the candidate who comes in third will see his or her votes eliminated and, if voters have chosen someone in second place for that candidate, those second place votes will then move up. That process won’t happen for 15 days, when all the first place votes are all counted.
Ranked choice voting is, ultimately, a way of allowing people who vote for a losing candidate to have another chance at voting. Critics say this allows some voters to vote more than once, while voters who pick the winning candidate only get to vote once.
That has 14th Amendment problems of unequal protection for voters, but Alaskans have to cope with the lopsided voting system they approved with Ballot Measure 2 in 2020.
On Tuesday night, some of the 23,884 absentee ballots that were mailed to voters will still be in the wild, not yet received by Division of Elections. Absentee ballots, historically, have leaned Republican in Alaska.
The first-choice results will be reported Tuesday night. That will be the totals of ballots the Division will have, but election workers will need to go through all the absentee ballots one by one to make sure people did not vote twice — one with an absentee, and one in person. The process is tedious and even if completed quickly, the second round of counting cannot take place until the Division can determine which candidate gets eliminated first.
The ranked-choice results will be released between Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, and election certification is scheduled for Sept. 2. If there are court challenges or a candidate asks for a recount — and that has happened many times in Alaska — that could delay the swearing in of the temporary congressional representative. Alaska has never used the ranked choice system, and a recount of this type of system must be done by the same machines that counted it the first time. There is no practical way to recount ranked choice results by hand.
The front of the ballot is easier. It’s a pick-one primary for governor, U.S. senator, and 59 state House and Senate seats. Those results should be known fairly quickly on Election Night or on Wednesday, for some rural areas.
Occasionally in Alaska, races are close and the final results are delayed until more absentee ballots arrive. In 2006, the tie vote between Bryce Edgemon and Carl Moses had to be broken with a coin toss, which is how Edgmon came to serve in the House of Representatives.
