Murray Walsh: Ranked-choice voting serves the obedient Democrats, hurts Republicans

1. How’s the petition going to end ranked choice voting?

   • It takes us back to party primaries where parties choose who they want to represent them in the main election.

2. Rank choice voting is a “shell game” that works for the Democrats because they aren’t fractured like the Republicans who field moderate, far right candidates and Democrats in Republican clothing. They win because Republicans split the vote between two or three candidates.

3. Ranked Choice Voting is perceived as a bugaboo by many members of the Republican Party and, without a doubt, it resulted in Senator Lisa Murkowski’s reelection. RCV also resulted in Mary Peltola’s election.
   But really, those elections were the result of Republicans inability to rally behind a somewhat moderate candidate or just figure out how to work effectively as a coherent party.
   RCV actually helped some Republican candidates.
   Railing against RCV is a bit like grousing about the electoral college. It is what it is and Republicans need to stop whining and act thoughtfully to elect good candidates. Case in point is Nick Begich. Rank him first or second if you’re inclined towards the Republican perspective based on liberty interests but don’t do a Palin thing and assume your candidate is the only and anointed person worthy of election.
   We all willingly accept the next best alternative in life on various occasions and do so cheerfully. That’s all RCV is, as applied to politics. Accept that and act accordingly.

   • Joe
     There is only one reason AK has RCV. Lisa M knew she could not win her party primary so she brought RCV and millions in dark money to AK. Just follow the money. It is a joke and like mail in voting favors Democrats wherever it is done.

   • The real reason why AK got Peltola is too many Begich voters ranked her second.
     It was not an inability to rally behind one candidate, it was hatred for the other GOP candidate.
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     Also, as a reminder, Begich came in 3rd in every 2020 race he was in. Both primaries and both elections.

     • Yes, and Begich is still plugging away.
       Sarah Palin off with rich, old, retired sports star boyfriend. Mary Peltola out cruising for Husband #6. Dahlstrom ready for a retirement home.
       NB3 is our man.

4. “Ranked-choice voting serves the obedient Democrats, hurts Republicans.” Well isn’t that the whole point of it after all?

   • While I like this article in general, I think it sends us down the wrong trail. Telling Republicans that RCV helps Democrats because they are ‘more obedient’ is simply appealing to our own right wing conceit.

     This can have the effect of clouding our eyes on how RCV is damaging our elections in Alaska.
     Example: If Democrats benefit from RCV because they are ‘more obedient’ – why are Democrats aggressively shutting down every attempt by Republicans to install RCV in Democrat strongholds like New York, California and Oregon? Shouldn’t they be encouraging RCV everywhere?

     Answer: RCV doesn’t benefit Democrats or Republicans. It benefits Minority parties at the expense of the Majority. In Alaska, that means more Democrats and RINO Republicans get elected, at the expense of conservative Republicans. In California – it means more Republicans and moderate Democrats – which is why RCV will never be allowed to take root there.

     If you are right leaning and want conservative political outcomes – you should want RCV out of Alaska immediately – and given a nice happy home in Washington State, Oregon and California.

     • Nicely said!

5. “The Game of Politics” … We just need to be better and more disciplined; learn how to ‘game’ the system and win. RCV doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.

6. Ranked Choice Voting is not American.

   • OK, genius, what is it then?

     • I cannot answer for Daniel, but in my opinion,
       One person, one vote, in person, with photo ID, on one day.

       • Got news for you Skippy. RCV gives only one vote to every person. However, it lets them move that vote to their next choice if their first choice loses. Its not a second vote; rather, its a re-assigned single vote. In the end, only 150,000 votes are counted out of 150,000 votes cast. The main difference between RCV and traditional voting is RCV sets 50%+1 vote as a threshold to win an election. Meanwhile, a candidate with 49.99% of voter cannot win. The question RCV fails to answer is: why are these particular numbers so arbitrarily magical?

         • No, RCV does not give one vote per person.
           It gives every person up to five votes. Select an unpopular candidate, and you get a second, third, or even fourth vote instantly. But, the person who votes for the frontrunner only gets one vote.
           .
           As to the 50+% stuff, that is nothing but mob rule. Just because more than 50% of the voters could “live” with a candidate winning does not mean they are getting the representation they want. Something like 40% of the voters wanted Peltola, but more than 50% could tolerate her in the House. Which, translates to 60% of the voters are not properly represented.
           .
           And, Skippy, before you say anything, I would rather have had Peltola win outright with 40% of the votes than go through the contortions that are required for RCV to work.

           • So 50% is “mob rule” but 40% is totally fine with you? You make no sense. Like it or not, ~11,000 of Nick Begich’s voters preferred Peltola over Palin. Look up the results for yourself.

         • Wayne you are correct, but a better way to explain it is that RCV is no different than a runoff election. The only difference is that you are voting in the runoff at the same time as the general election.
           .
           When Anchorage had a runoff for the Mayor this past May, did the people who voted in the runoff somehow “vote twice”? Of course not; they were two separate elections and every registered voter had the independent opportunity to vote in either, both or none. RCV is no different in concept; it merely saves the taxpayers the time and expense of conducting a separate runoff.

           • RCV is for Democrats. It was run up by Scott Kendall to keep Lisa Murkowski away from being primaried out. Simple as that.
             Real pilots will vote it off the map. Blue skies for Republicans and patriots. Democrats will fly into sucker holes…….
             Where they belong.

7. Easily manipulated. Each side has two candidates, one Democrat will drop out at the last minute. The Democrat wins because they get the entire vote. Republicans split their votes handing over an easy victory.

   • Jim, a candidate cannot drop out at the last minute; their name will remain on the ballot. When Al Gross dropped out last time, it was before the ballots were printed. However, a court later reprimanded the Election Division for failing to replace Gross with the next highest vote-getter from the open primary. Later, the Election Division would not release the full ranked choices of ballots until two weeks after election day (if you recall). Their reasoning documented: “the voters wouldn’t understand.” Disgraceful corruption in the division in my opinion.

8. Unions, democrats and communists are all the same – they march in lock-step with their comrades. They are at peril if they question the authorities and will not hesitate to use violence against their members or anyone else who disagrees with them.

   • Med check time for Johnny Handcock.

     • What did he say that was wrong?

9. Yes, good analysis. Realize however that RCV should be framed as an electoral ‘biological weapon’. Its something you want to employ on your political enemies’ home turf. RCV doesn’t inherently benefit Republican or Democrat, left or right. It benefits the minority party – at the expense of the majority. In Alaska, that means Democrats benefit and why is was pushed by Democrats. In California, that means Republicans would benefit – so Democrats refuse to allow RCV to take hold there.

   Democrats will gaslight and claim you can’t really ‘split the vote’ because of the ranked system. Lie by omission – they are counting on human psychology to do the heavy lifting for them.

   Ordinarily there is a Republican primary where both candidates are hammering each other, and often create a lot of bad blood. But a winner emerges, and then there are several weeks to ‘mend fences’, win back the supporters of the losing candidate – and focus on uniting to win the general election.

   In Alaska, RCV robs us of this. All Republicans are forced to rank vote in the general election while nerves are raw and intraparty attack ads are fresh in people’s minds – leading to bullet voting and outright defection.

   Democrats know this, and this is why they push RCV in Republican states, but refuse to allow it on their home turf. Its an electoral biological weapon.

10. It’s Republicans who allow Democrats to win in rank voting. By not following the legal method of voting, like it or not, Democrats while a fraction of the population will continue to beat Republicans as long as certain elements in the Republican party refuse to vote for Republican candidates.

    • This is effectively victim blaming and ignores the intentionally rigged nature of RCV – legal or not.

      Effectively you are asking Republican candidates (and their supporters) to ‘fight tooth and nail’ right up until voting day, yet still rank votes unemotionally when nerves are most raw from harsh words and attack ads.
      Only way to avoid this is to rig elections by candidates dropping out, or candidates are forced to run ultra-gay hand-holding campaigns with milktoast positions. “Vote for me and don’t forget to rank my opponent second! He’s just super-duper, guys!” Candidates CAN’T go on the attack at risk of mutually assured destruction – leaving our media as the only entity left to influence elections.

      • Nope, none of that.

        I’m just asking people to count, something most of us have done since we were little children. The math isn’t hard to do, but some people would prefer Democrats like Peltola remain in office and blame the election system instead of people who would cut off their nose to spite their face.

        • Nice example of gaslighting.
          “RCV is fine bros, you just need to vote smarter!”
          while knowing full well human nature isn’t going to change.

          But yes, Begich voters have already proven, twice, that they prefer Democrats running things rather than ranking other Republicans. It will be a problem as long as we are stuck with RCV.

          • Math is hard.
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            Wait, that’s not even math…that’s just putting numbers in order. No gaslighting, no victim blaming, no reason to pretend something as easy as counting is a difficult thing to do.

            Rank voting is dumb, losing elections because you want to make a point about not understanding simple concepts is even dumber.

            • Telling voters to ‘Get more smarter, tards!’ is like solving poverty by telling transients to ‘Just Be Rich!”

              Voters as a group, are always going to be dumb and emotional – always have been, always will be. RCV preys on this unfortunate reality. Unless you plan on replacing voters with robots – or a race of genetically superior supermen, RCV will always generate the outcomes we’ve seen in 2022.

              Far simpler to remove the RCV system you seem to love so much – than try to make thousands of voters smarter and less emotional.

              Why do people punch a wall when they are angry? Not logical, but they do it all the time, sometimes breaking bones. Its for the same reason they vote irrationally when campaign tactics make them angry. No more RCV, no more ‘angry voting’. No need for impossible social engineering projects.

              • Apu,

                You should read what I write before continuing to make it obvious that you aren’t responding to what was written.

                “the RCV system you seem to love so much” – You clearly haven’t been paying attention as I’ve made it abundantly clear that I’m no fan of rank voting.

                I’m sorry that you fail to understand the conversation taking place.

                • You seem slow, so let me spell it out.

                  We’ve moved past your fake opposition to RCV, ‘Steve’. You troll the comments section with a passive ‘solution’ to RCV (just vote smarter, guys!) that will never work – and as a bonus, simultaneously insults the victims.

                  None of your time wasting replies addressed a single point made in this thread. Instead, you deflect by making an insipid comparison of voting to counting, repeatedly implied ‘Republicans’ were the actual problem, and then finally pretending to ‘ack-tua-lly’ be against RCV.

                  So yes, I perfectly understand the conversation.

                  • “Voters as a group, are always going to be dumb and emotional – always have been, always will be.”

                    Yeah, it’s definitely more of a you problem.

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                    It’s not that hard for most people to figure out. One can dislike the law and understand it at the same time, I’m sorry you are struggling with the concept.

11. Apu is correct. RCV doesn’t necessarily benefit either Democrats or Republicans. It depends on the political climate of the area. It only benefits the party least represented or contested. It also is so convoluted that many voters are disenfranchised due the rules that allow your vote to count in each round.

    All in all RNC is not a fair, unbiased election process. Add the higher costs and delays involved in counting and recounting and it’s not worth the wait! Not fair, not efficient, it simply has to go! Vote YES on prop 2 in Nov.!!!

    • I think both are right.

      RVC is a scam if the first order. It needs to go, and soon.

      It was the worst kind of political malpractice for the AKGOP to not work harder and more effectively to stop it.

      However, it’s here now and we need to figure out how to beat it until we get rid of it.

      • Masked, you nailed it except for one point. You never suggested how to beat it. Currently, our best hope would be to persuade Dahlstrom to withdraw. However, that won’t happen so Peltola has a good probability of victory.

    • Perhaps the conservative media in Alaska (I’m looking at you, Suzanne) could have spent the past four years educating their readers and listeners on how to effectively use RCV win elections instead of just telling them that they are too stupid to understand it.

      • Suzanne gets it right. Pay attention to your instruments and quit opining on the weather. Maybe your medical is out-dated?

12. Open primaries are absolutely 100% wrong.
    Can anyone tell me why a registered, card carrying Republican should have any say in what candidate the Democrat party wants to represent them in the General Election? And vice versa.
    .
    If you cannot be bothered to register with a party, you cede your right to tell that party who their candidate should be. End of story. Want to be undeclared, you get no say in who represents the Republicans or the Democrats.
    .
    And, I do not want to hear about “the taxpayers are funding the primaries.” That is a red herring tossed out there to confuse and diffuse the issue. The taxpayers fund a LOT of stuff that does not benefit every citizen. This is no different. If you want to make that argument, you better be arguing against homeless assistance, schools, Medicaid, etc… etc… etc…

    • Exactly. Alaska Democrats have been trying via the courts to end the closed Republican party for decades because they wanted their voters to freely cross-over and sabotage Republican candidates ahead of the general elections. They only finally managed it with a misleading ‘dark money’ initiative that changed our entire voting system – during a questionable COVID mail-in ballot election. Even then, it only passed by the barest of margins.

      The initiative wasn’t even intended to stop ‘dark money’ influence – as massive amounts of dark money is being used to fight the citizens repeal of the rotten RCV system. What, did you think they were going to willingly give up their California donors?

    • George Washington himself warned us of the dangers of “factions” (a.k.a. parties) in American politics in his farewell address, and yet (in most states) we have created systems that formally entrench the roles of parties – especially the main two – in the political process. We should better heed Washington’s advice; partisan labels at best allow for a lazy and uninformed electorate and at worst allow candidates to grossly mislead that lazy, uninformed electorate about their views.

      • Speak for yourself. MRAK readers are informed. It seems you should be too, but apparently you aren’t paying attention to your flying. I pray for your passengers, buddy.

13. Everyone seems to know how ranked choice voting (RCV) supposedly works.
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    But no one outside The Club knows how RCV actually works.
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    What we know is: (a) only about 5% of the electronic ballot count is cross checked against a hand count to see if the proprietary machinery’s counting as intended, and (b) the ballot audit trail disappears after the first RCV shuffle.
    .
    So proprietary vote-tabulation gear, crooked state voter rolls, maybe a pinch of dark money, election observers with no clue what they’re observing, crooked talk-show hosts, along with so many other problems, are all in play for an election to repeal RCV?
    .
    What could possibly go wrong?
    .
    Would it be rude to ask Candidate Dahlstrom why, as Lieutenant Governor, she never found time to restore honesty and transparency to Alaska’s election system?

    • I could be wrong, but my understanding is that initiatives can be repealed by the Legislature after two years. If we had unified Republican control of the Legislature and the Governor’s Office, RCV would be already gone.

      Unfortunately, ever since the late scumbag Lyda Green made it popular in 2008, we’ve been plagued with scumbag RINO Republicans selling out our electoral House and Senate majorities to the Democrats in exchange for committee chairs.

      Any bill to repeal this will be blocked by Democrats until we control both wings of the Legislature. Any Democrat or ‘fake Republicans’ like Bill Walker will also veto, so we need to retain the Governorship as well. Until then, our best bet is a repeal via initiative – but there is a literal avalanche of ‘dark money’ from out of state – being spent to defend it.

    • Some of that blame goes to the useless AK GOP.

      RVC is a crapfest shilled by a talk show host who should and probably did know better.

      But, it did pass. At that point, the AK GOP should have gotten into high gear to teach every registered voter how to use it. But it’s the AKGOP, so proactive planning isn’t there strong point.

      Yes, RVC is a blight. And it needs to go. But we gotta deal with it until we dump it.

14. “Democrat rank and file are more gullible and obedient than the Republican base.”

    Ok, the irony of that statement made me laugh hardily. Go put your ear bandages on my MAGA friends, and tell me how gullible and obedient the democrats are.

    • Ear bandages one a few people does not represent millions of people.

      The problem with the left vs the right or red vs blue is that you all are very quick to jump into generalizations and are bickering over inconsequential information.

      The true threat to the country are the deep state players who wear the clothing of both democrat and republican. The more you peasants fight against each other in politics that you treat as sports teams, the easier it is to enslave you further.

      The more you fight, the lower your vibration becomes and the more susceptible you are to manipulation.

      Want to make this country truly a better place? Make the change within and uplift others in the process.

      Time to grow up, children.

      • I’d be all about it if we had a leader who could accomplish this. But Trump ain’t that leader. He’s too self absorbed, too selfish, and too stupid. He wants only yes men around him, not the mark of a true leader.

15. Phil Izon put out a text (and an article on another site) that Ranked Choice Voting is still on the ballot! Good! VOTE TO REPEAL RANKED CHOICE VOTING!

16. Look at the UK’s recent general election results to see what happens when ACTUAL vote-splitting occurs in a plurality/”first past the post” system. The UK’s elections work the same as most of the US, with candidates only needing to receive a plurality of votes to win the seat. In their general election held earlier this month, widespread discontent with the Conservative Party led many conservatives to vote for Reform UK (which has an actual conservative platform as opposed to merely paying lip-service). Despite receiving only 1/3 of the vote total (and the sum of Reform and Conservative votes exceeding Labour), the Labour Party won almost 2/3 of the seats in the House of Commons. Had RCV been employed, Reform voters could have at least indicated the Conservative candidate as their second choice and Labour would likely not have won so many seats.

    • Oh, and you think the UK is a sound operating model? They have some of the worst societal problems in western Europe. Forget about them. Make America Great Again.
      ps….you should try a jet.

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