By ALEX GIMARC

A new round of pro-ranked choice voting ads have been running for at least a week. The ads exhort the listener to vote against the repeal in November. The new arguments are all wrapped around supposed “loss of freedom” to vote for whomever you want to vote for in the primary election.

Who are the perpetrators of this repeal of ranked-choice voting? The ads blame usual punching bag — political insiders and shadowy political bosses.  

The ads are backed by same three entities as the previous round, Unite America Institute, Final Five Fund, and the Action Now Institute. The three organizations continue to be outside non-profits using dark money to meet their political goals in Alaska. 

The difference this time around is that they finally managed to find a local Alaskan to chair their effort: Lesil McGuire, former Republican state senator, who frankly ought to know better.

Note the disconnect here. After running and winning multiple elections as a proud Republican, McGuire is now arm-in-arm with a group of outside non-profits who believe Republicans, Democrats, Greens, AIP, and Libertarians should not be able to select their own party candidates. This is a mistake, an unforced error.

The biggest claim the pro-RCV crowd is making is that Alaskans who want to select their own candidates are somehow pawns of party elite, insiders. Is there any truth to that?

Given that RCV was brought to Alaska by “Team Lisa” Murkowski, after her far-too-close reelection in 2016, one can fairly easily demonstrate that the real shadowy political elite were actually the people who brought RCV into Alaska and deceptively sold it to an unsuspecting electorate.

Note that Alaska law allows anyone to get his or her name on the primary ballot. Before RCV, every single candidate who won a party’s primary made it to the general election as long as it was a recognized political party. Normally, this included Republican, democrat, Green, Libertarian, Alaskan Independence. 

The Republican Moderate Party was a player for a couple election cycles. Over the years, Green, Libertarian, and Republican Moderates lost the ability to field a candidate because they received insufficient votes in the general to make the next general election ballot. 

As usual, independents and registered non-partisans could make the general election ballot based on signatures gathered.  

Under the old regime, we regularly saw 5-8 possible candidates for the statewide offices, with smaller numbers for more local legislative seats. But now, RCV eliminates our choices by only sending the top four candidates to the general election, doing what they accuse their current punching bag of doing.  

The most important thing the current jungle primary does is minimize the ability of political parties to select their preferred candidates. Joining a party is relatively easy. You work within the party structure to select your candidate, let them sort it out in the primary with the winner going on to the general election. Should nobody get a majority in the general, they go to a runoff.  

The pro-RCV crowd is of the opinion that Alaskans aren’t sufficiently intelligent to select their own party candidates, blaming all pushback on some mythical group of party insiders and elites. But we see quite clearly that the only elites involved are those connected with Team Lisa who gave us RCV and who are today furiously defending this thing.  

The pro-RCV political elite continue to rail against the political choices of not so well-connected Alaskans, those who do not have the resources to bring in multiple Outside non-profits with millions of dollars of dark money to defend their new election system by blanketing the airways with ads.

In fact, the repeal effort is a completely grass roots effort. Calling it an inside job is committing fraud on the Alaskan citizens, just like they committed with the promise four years ago that RCV would eliminate Outside money, dark money from Alaskan elections, a promise conveniently dropped from the current round of ads. They lied before. They are lying today.  

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Don’t let them get away with it again.  

Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.

Learn more about ranked-choice voting at Foundation for Government Accountability.