Democrats around the country, including Alaska, are changing the rules of elections to their advantage, according to a new report.
“Across the country, they are introducing legislation to implement ranked-choice voting, which would completely change how votes are counted. While there are plenty of reasons to oppose ranked-choice voting, the best argument against it is its track record,” says a new report in the Foundation for Government Accountability.
Thousands of ballots are thrown in the trash to produce the majority vote required for ranked-choice voting, the report says.
“This means that when voters in ranked-choice voting jurisdictions leave their polling station, they cannot be sure if their vote will be counted or end up in the dump with last week’s dinner,” the authors write.
Ranked-choice voting is a leftist strategy to tip results, and it’s led to voter disenfranchisement, trashed ballots, and confusion. While there are plenty of reasons to oppose ranked-choice voting, the best argument against it is its own track record, the foundation reports.
“Currently, both Alaska and Maine use ranked-choice voting for some statewide elections. Both states have witnessed ranked-choice voting result in sending a Democrat to Congress when voters’ preference was to send a Republican to represent them.Now, a growing number of local jurisdictions are using ranked-choice voting to elect candidates, and the process is being pushed by Democrats and the Left nationwide,” the report says.
Supporters of ranked-choice voting argue that the system guarantees that elected officials receive majority support from the electorate. But this is a false majority that only comes about after ballots are thrown out and discarded.
Tell me again which party has a majority of seats in the legislature? Which party does the Governor belong two? How about two of our three members of Congress?
Don’t like the results? Run better candidates that appeal to the 65% of Alaska voters that are not affiliated with a party.
And of all the elected officials you name, how many of them were elected in an election using ranked choice voting?
The facts make your assertion laughable. Thanks for the chuckle.
All but Sen. Sullivan.
’86, the real laugh was: “How about two of our three members of Congress?” Thanks again for the chuckle.
Ya don’t say…..
Reminder: both the Dems and Repubs oppose RCV because it gives the power back to the People.
RCV gives power to the dark money gonzos. Thanks for playing. Cheers –
I am sorry, but how, exactly does that happen?
Explain your logic.
How does RCV give power back to the people? I need a cause/effect kind of logic.
Actually the opposite is true. It gives more power to some people. If you have “one person one vote” all votes are equal, but with RCV one person may have 4 votes, while others only get 3 or two depending how they voted. I will NOT give my vote to any individual I fundamentally disagree with, since even a 4th place vote may help them win. That means my ballot will be exhausted sooner than others, giving their votes more strength as mine is discarded and the vote pool to reach majority shrinks. Then there is the vote counting which can not be done by hand and requires computer algorithms and a public trust that the system is honest. “One person one vote” count can be reproduced by hand count and physical observation and is much less prone to manipulation.
Rank choice voting is a scam, poor man’s way to getting elected. Reality! it still is in play, its the model that will be used during US Senator’s re-election, if Alaska don’t want a woke, antisemetic, military hating, mediocre millennial elected then Sullivan is the only choice for Alaskans to unite behind. The current leaders specifically the Republican leadership and Alaska GOP got to find a diplomatic and legislative way to get rid of it. Or non democrat voters will have to learn to unify not to being swayed by negative dissenting voices about the minor imperfections of a Republican to split the votes between R candidates. Dunleavy’s voters did a good job not splitting the vote squeezing him past Gara and Walker whose democratic voters were split for a change.
Sullivan will need the same support Dunleavy received while he campaigns for re-election even though for all their Republican imperfections and moderate or questionable ways they had completed and assisted in good work for their Republican base, but that’s because of this is Alaska we aren’t Florida there are other players Replublican leaders must contend praying they don’t lose their identity nor radically change their conservative, libertarian, or Republican values while they govern a among moderates, democrats, leftists, liberals, union and pro big leaders. government
Your comment exemplifies what I have been saying all along, which is that conservative media has done a spectacularly poor job of educating voters on how RCV works. RCV actually prevents vote-splitting by allowing you to order any number of the candidates according to your preference rather than being forced to choose only one. For example, if there are 3 Rs and 1 D in the race, you rank the 3 Rs as 1st, 2nd and 3rd (the order is up to you).
You don’t get it (or are deliberately obtuse). Let’s say I have a choice between Jamie Allard, Cathy Giessel and Gabrielle Ledoux all supposedly republicans, why should I rank two people I vehemently disagree with? This exhausts my ballot early and cuts down on the number of votes needed to reach a majority. Essentially you are electing someone with 50% of the votes of the minority, who had no such scruples and see one republican or democrat as good as the other.
A Taxpayer,
RCV cannot indicate your support or lack of support for any candidate; it only indicates relative preferences. For example, it doesn’t indicate voter’s broad appeal for a candidate despite what Rob Richie says. The vote counters have no way to interpret your lack of a ranking as a lack of support for that candidate.
There’s no real harm in failing to rank, let’s say, two candidates if you truly have no preference one over the other. Your ballot getting exhausted harms your voting power or political influence not at all. If you do have a preference, you should indicate that, though. You should rank all candidates if you are able to. Also, a “majority winner” has no meaning generally, particularly in RCV elections.
Foundation for Government Accountability is just another political hack tank with little credibility. I wonder how the lawsuit against them is going.
“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
― Joseph Stalin
Buh Duh! They are looking to keep this money ball rolling. What a joke.
Duh!
RC Voting was the biggest mistake Alaska ever made. The governor and Lt. Governor don’t seem to interested in our election process. I’ve sent emails and got not one response.
If they’d worked to your advantage in the last election, you wouldn’t be making a peep.
No, Whidbey, that is simply a typical Democrat/leftist’s response and viewpoint, and is just in line with everything else we see from the radical left — as long as it results in them/you gaining power, ANYTHING is fair game. You radical leftists truly have no principles and no sense of justice or fair play at all. Machiavelli was one of you.
I would be.
I am adamantly opposed to RCV, and open primaries. 1,000% plus opposed.
If it worked to my advantage in the last election, I would still sign petitions to have it repealed.
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Curiously, the side that did get an advantage is actively trying to stop efforts to overturn it. So… you are correct. Humans are funny that way. When they are winning they tend to ignore the shenanigans.
Well at least you’re principled. I tend to think that, for the majority on here, Whidbey is on to something.
No. But he’s definitely ON something. Could be alcohol. Pot. Mushrooms. Crack. Like most Lefties, they are either taking another break from their government jobs, or counting their retirement savings from their former government jobs. Their only value left in life is to troll conservative internet sites.
Since it did (remember the governor) your point is moot.
The point of contention remains. RCV is a manipulation and awards higher weight to some votes, while shrinking the vote pool to achieve a majority.
Well now we need for voters to understand it and repeal this stupid voting mess created by the power hungry politicians.
Seriously! Now we pay for a group to
Tell us something! The people already knew?
The fact is that a Democrat represents Alaska in the House because voters for Nick Begich could not bring themselves to hold their noses and rank Palin 2nd. Sites like this should have spent 2022 educating voters on how RCV works and how it eliminates the problem of “spoiler” candidates, but instead the conservative media in Alaska rallied around the message that their readers and listeners are too stupid to understand RCV. You, the conservative media, have only yourselves to blame.
The post-mortems are many and varied Pilot – the choice now is to stop blaming, remove BM2 RCV, and stand together with Nick.
All sorts of people were eager to explain how RCV should work.
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No one seems as eager to explain whether RCV actually did work as advertised.
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No one’s questioned whether testing machine-counting accuracy by comparing only 5% of machine-counted RCV votes to hand-counted votes is a forensically valid test of machine-counting accuracy.
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No one’s admitted that, after the second round of RCV vote shuffling, there is –no– ballot audit trail, which may be why no one’s explaining with any credibility whether RCV actually did work as advertised.
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But some people do seem quite okay with unelected government officials effectively re-casting peoples’ ballots, randomly discarding ballots, relying on machines using proprietary software and firmware to tabulate votes, using ERIC-manipulated voter registration files, allowing ballot-box stuffing, allowing ballot harvesting.
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Kindly remind again, given what unelected government officials have been doing to America and Americans every day since 2020, why Americans should trust this same invasive species around their election system.
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Share a bit of wisdom… where in America’s Constitution the problem of “spoiler” candidates is mentioned, why they need eliminating, whose job it is to eliminate them?
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Could conservative media be like the irritating warnings a pilot’s conditioned himself to ignore, and insists others ignore too, just before running out of ideas, airspeed, and altitude around the same time?
Apart from your (unsupported) allegations of fraud, RCV worked exactly as advertised. According to the official results, 7,477 of Nick Begich’s voters preferred Peltola over Palin (which baffles me, but that is nonetheless how they voted). Another 13,894 of his voters did not vote for Peltoa, but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Palin either. It’s exactly the same as those voters simply not participating in a separate runoff election held at a later date. Like it or not, Mary Peltola was the most acceptable candidate for a majority of the voters which is exactly what RCV produces. Hopefully they’re having buyer’s remorse, but it’s obvious that Alaska is not the conservative stronghold people think it is.
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Here are the results for the 2022 House election: ‘https://www.elections.alaska.gov/results/22GENR/US%20REP.pdf
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To my knowledge, neither the United States Constitution nor Alaska’s Constitution mention anything about spoiler candidates, nor do they mandate any particular method of voting. Your non-sequitur rhetorical point bypasses the issue, which is that an electoral system should produce the result that most voters want or at least find acceptable. Plurality systems (which is what you advocate for), especially when combined with partisan primaries, fail miserably at this by producing candidates who are more ideologically extreme (due to the need to appeal to a party’s “base” during the primary) and by completely shutting out minor parties, and the views of those parties’ voters, from the final result.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
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Seems reasonable to ask, considering the abuses inflicted routinely on Americans by unelected government officials, what virtue lies in unconditionally trusting election systems to unelected, virtually omnipotent officials, accountable as they are to no one for the integrity of what they say or do; technologically and procedurally insulated as they are from traditional checks and balances provided by observers who know exactly what they’re observing?
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Okay, short version: what persuades us beyond reasonable doubt that RCV is not the culmination of a Perfect Crime in progress?
I don’t think Hank done it this way…
It’s always about control with leftists.
A vote should count once and you should only ever be able to vote for one person.
Why shouldn’t a voter be able to give his or her opinion of every candidate on the ballot? Please also consider we may not have to use a system that permits us to vote for or against candidates. We could use a system that only indicates relative preferences. The candidate most preferred by all voters should be elected. Or we could have every voter give an up or down vote for every candidate on the ballot, and the one most approved of is elected.
I said many times that the RCV system was engineered to allow 2 candidates to combine their votes to defeat a candidate that they could not defeat mano-a-mano. I stand by that and see that the Foundation for Government Accountability agrees. Why did it take so much time for such a obvious decision?
If one was to crack open the history books, they would find out that rank choice voting has been around a long time. RCV put an individual into power who was responsible for laying waste to Europe and incinerating 6 million Jews and those declared “undesirable”. The mentioned former private would’ve only received 30% of the vote. With RCV, he won by a landslide.
By supporting RCV, you support the nationalist socialist party.
Actually the Reichstag used party-list proportional representation which is completely different from RCV, if facts are important to you. Try reading a little deeper into those history books, rather than merely skimming the paragraph headings, if you truly want to understand how Hitler came to power.
Thank You Suzanne..
Fact: With ranked choice voting, some ballots are counted once; others are counted twice.
That is a gross mischaracterization of how RCV works. A more accurate comparison would be with runoff elections, where if no candidate gets a majority (or, for some reason, 45% in the case of the mayor in Anchorage), another election must be held between the top two candidates. If a voter chooses not to participate in the runoff election, their vote “doesn’t count” because they chose not to vote at all. With RCV, voters essentially vote in the “runoff” at the same time (which is why it is called “instant runoff voting” in other parts of the world), saving the taxpayers the time and expense of conducting a separate runoff election and allowing the final results to be available sooner. If a voter chooses not to rank a sufficient number of candidates, it is no different than not voting in a runoff. No one’s vote is counted twice.
Your “explanation” seems to repeat talking points. Fact: With ranked choice voting, some votes are counted once, others are counted twice. That is a physical fact that must be acknowledged. RCV truncates the democratic process. In the name of efficiency, the next step in this line of reasoning might be, by statute, to determine that anyone registered as a member of political party will presumptively vote for party’s designated candidate. That would simplify the process and save time and money, wouldn’t it? We could write a statute that says that. RCV makes subtile but significant changes to the democratic process. The changes were sold to the public on efficiency grounds but the reality is that it tilts the process.
Re: “With ranked choice voting, some votes are counted once, others are counted twice.”
In any particular round, each voter’s vote for a single candidate is counted only once. Every one is allowed only one vote in each round, and is allowed to vote in every round that is held. A voter can decide not to participate in later rounds if he or she chooses.
If you like and support a candidate, you can vote for them (once); if you don’t like a candidate you can vote against them, potentially, more than once. I did not like Sarah Palin as a candidate. In the special election, I was able vote against Palin and for Begich in the first round and against Palin and for Peltola in the second round. In the general election a friend that posts here convinced me not to vote for Peltola for my second choice. I stand by my initial post and reiterate: RCV distorts the electoral process.
RVC wouldn’t be a thing if the GOP had mobilized voters to stop it.
But the party that can’t reign in Princess or support Kelly-and their afternoon drive radio host- pimped it themselves.
BM2 passed with a slim majority. A very slim majority, and it took almost 10 days to find out it passed. Had to count every ballot, right?
It is the law in AK because of “questionable” ballot counting. If it really took until the last handful of absentee ballots were received in order to win, it is not something that should have been passed.
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I would propose that in the future, ballot measures require a 60% majority to pass, instead of 50% + 1 vote.
I recall the measure was being voted down by a good margin, until the absentee ballots came in. When absentee ballots results differ so radically from the monitored votes, it’s difficult to believe they are legit.
Given that it was 2020, and that there was a fairly strong correlation between one’s place on the political spectrum and how fearful one was to leave one’s home for fear of catching a cold, it is actually not surprising to me at all that the voting patterns of those who voted absentee would be different than those who voted in person. That being said, Alaska has an excellent early in-person voting system and mail-in absentee voting should be reserved to those who truly cannot visit a polling place during the entire two weeks that early voting is available.
I don’t disagree.
But I still hold the AK GOP did a crap job attempting to rally the troops and explain what was at stake.
I remember in the days before the election the Porcaro show was full of people asking what it was and how to vote. So of course the prime advocate and paid promoter of it touted it as a way to advance conservative candidates.
We have a sad history of irregular ballot counting. Until we mandate a reasonable cut off period and stop letting the bush take 31 years to report in, we’ll continue to do so.
That’s why voting in large numbers matter. Create a lead (if we can) the bush can’t somehow overcome.
In this, the AK GOP was in their usual position. Fetal.
Republicans lose because they run extremist morons like Palin, fact. Look at Dunleavy, didn’t even have to go to Rank choice voting because the other two
candidates were not well liked at all. So to you right wing whiners I say shut up and realize we don’t want your ilk, 65% of Alaskans are independent. I know that’s hard for y’all to figure out when you and your 5 best friends all think the world was created in 7 actual 24 hr days. But the facts are most of us don’t believe that fairy tale and realize it was just man’s way of explaining the unknown. You are the minority, so shut up and color and allow the adults to run this state.
Finally someone who actually uses their brain here.
RINO, Republicans did not “run … Palin.” In fact -and I’m presuming facts matter to you- BM2 prohibits the Republican Party from running any candidate. Any person at all can self-identify as a Republican and there is nothing the party can do about it. But to your ill-advised command that the “right wing” should “shut up,” I shake my head. Even if 65% of Alakans (I think you mean Alaskan voters) are not identified as a member of a named party, it is a far stretch that they want the “right wing” to self-censor. But you do, and that shows the readers here the kind of citizen you are.
Don’t feed the troll.
“Any person at all can self-identify as a Republican and there is nothing the party can do about it.”
This is definitely a very crucial flaw of the top-four system that harms free association rights of partie, but it’s really easy to fix. All parties would support, or no party would block, passage of a law that allows any party to determine who can use the party name when they file and run for an office.
Here’s a fun fact, If Wack jobs like Palin didn’t run Moderate Conservatives would win. Far Right wingers and Left wingers may be the dumbest people on earth.
Your name Rino is quite appropriate for the beliefs you espouse and the fact you think disparaging people is a winning argument.
This is America, so you can express your opinions however WRONG they are. You do not have a right to tell others they should shut up, shut up and color, and “we don’t want your ilk”, etc. You do not speak for everyone else or the majority even though you imply that you do. You are NOT “the adults who should run this state” as you self-annointed yourself. You would be better served to have an open mind instead of a closed I know everything better attitude and present a winning argument with pros and cons for your position and listen to other people’s perspectives and reasoning before passing judgment. You may learn something and others have a right to the expression and representation of their beliefs as well in America and Alaska. They are not extremists just because they have a different perception than yours.
Since you want to silence others, have totalitarian dictatorship and bullying leanings and want everyone to shut up and let only certain people run the state, per their ideas, perhaps you should move to Russia, China, or Iran.
So how do we get rid of Rank voting.
A good voting system should be simple, not requiring a group study to “understand “ how it works. A good vote counting system should be simple as well. Their should be no argument about how a candidate got elected from either side. Systems that cause doubt or confusion should not ever be implemented. Back to basics, like tying your shoes. Most things can be done simply and require no modern modifications.
You literally rank the candidates in order of preference; it’s no different than going to a restaurant and ordering prime rib, being informed that it is not available that night, and coming up with a backup choice. Why do conservatives think so little of their own voters?
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As a factual side-note, Australia has been using ranked-choice voting since 1919. This was actually pushed at the time by the center-right Nationalist party after a special election in 1918 which saw the (left-wing) Labor party winning with only 34% of the vote; the conservative vote had been almost evenly split between two different parties. RCV eliminates vote-splitting and “spoiler” candidates. And, given that it was 1919, they managed to count all of those “complicated” ranked-choice ballots by hand.
We’re not Australia. It’s a bad argument. Common language does not imply common culture or customs.
Worse is comparing something as trivial as food choices to something as important as a clear and easy voting system.
So…Australians are smarter than us? After all, they’ve managed to handle RCV for over 100 years. I don’t understand the point you’re making.
You totally missed my simple point. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken. Not like a restaurant at all. If a restaurant can’t serve me as desired, I can simply leave. And if a pilot can’t take me where I wish without side trips, I will find a better way.
Re: Trig: “Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken. ”
Problems:
1) D’s and R’s do not vote in their own primaries or nomination proceedings. Parties lose meaning/definition and platforms are not followed.
2) We don’t know who the most preferred candidate is if no candidate gets 50% + 1. For many of our elections, we’re guessing.
3) Primaries can eliminate the most preferred candidate of all voters from the ballot (e.g., Lisa Murkowski).
Thus, those elected are not representative of the citizens. It’s Broken!
RCV is great to overwhelm the voters, who don’t have time to actually understand the platform of each candidate. Remember the Weimar Republic? That’s what RCV primaries remind me off. Instead of parties picking the candidate their majority supports with outlined platforms and goals, you get 60 yahoos nobody has heard of. Investigating the field is a daunting task.
This isn’t a trivial matter of “oh no prime rib”. The outcome determines the direction of policy, laws and how all our tax dollars are spent. In my view, choosing second/third/fourth “best” isn’t a choice at all, as those candidates do not have what I am looking for in a policy maker. RCV implies that candidates are interchangeable. They are NOT.
I do not care who pushed this nonsense in Australia or that they like it. It’s their country and they can do as they please.
Please understand the basics of voting methods and social choice theory. ANY election with more than two candidates is NOT simple, and that is true even for a simple plurality election. Simple plurality elections can also cause doubt and confusion, especially if we add party primaries to the mix. For example, we may never really know whether Gore or Bush was the most preferred candidate in the year 2000 presidential election in Florida.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to oppose RCV, but these authors didn’t list any of them, at least not any of the major ones. Most of their reasons are just plain illogical or flawed. They appear to know very little or nothing about voting methods and the general area of social choice theory.
1) Re: RCV fails to always produce a true majority winner
This may be true, but neither does our present system, and no election with more than two candidates can guarantee a majority winner. It’s a false claim by FairVote, but the criterion is not important to begin with, so it isn’t a valid reason to discard or oppose RCV.
2) Re: The “40% D/60% R argument” in the special election three-way race between Peltola, Begich and Palin.
I get sick of seeing this very misguided argument. In a state in which 62% of voters do not register with or identify with either major party, it is perfectly plausible for a 40% D/60% R scenario to elect the D after one or more runoffs.
The correct argument is to point out that vote-splitting caused this particular election to suffer a spoiler scenario.
3) Re: “Ballots are trashed”
The correct term indeed is “exhausted ballot.” If they were literally trashed, that would be illegal, and people could get prison sentences for it.
4) Re: Poliquin should have been elected because he received more first place votes in the first round.
Had Poliquin been elected on that basis, he would have won via a spoiler scenario.
5) Re: RCV violates one person/one vote (or one person/ one ballot).
There may be more than one round or runoff, but every voter participates in all of those rounds unless they voluntarily decide not to.
6) Re: RCV is a scheme to get D’s elected.
Most any voting method simply cannot consistently elect more D’s if they really aren’t the most preferred candidates. If it can, then please explain how.
7) Re: “Ranked-choice voting gives voters an ultimatum: Either vote for people you dislike and who oppose your principles, or risk having your ballot trashed.”
This is actually a fairly legitimate claim for RCV itself, but under our present voting system, we often don’t vote for or against candidates either. Also, no one is voting for or against candidates with RCV, and vote-counters cannot interpret any ranking to be for candidates, or lack of rankings to be votes against candidates. It only indicates relative preferences. A voter can dislike all candidates on a ballot, but still rank every one of them. If an election that indicates voters’ true support for or dislike of candidates is desired, approval voting or score voting would be appropriate.
8) Re: RCV leads to errors
So does the primary/general election system with plurality voting. It’s more likely to lead to errors than RCV is.
Excellent points all around, and thank you for presenting them so eloquently! The only thing I’ll add is that, with regard to your point #2, had ALL of those voters who ranked Nick Begich first ranked Palin second, Palin would have won and exemplified the design behind RCV which, among other things, eliminates the necessity of vote-splitting between ideologically similar candidates. However, as I pointed out in a previous comment, over 13,000 Begich voters didn’t rank anyone second and over 7,000 ranked Peltola second. The fact is the election was close enough that even if all 13,000 had in fact ranked Palin second, the 7,000 who “broke ranks” still would have carried Peltola over the finish line. RCV, therefore, produced a result that accurately reflected the voters’ stated preferences.
Re: AK Pilot: “RCV, therefore, produced a result that accurately reflected the voters’ stated preferences.”
Begich was the most preferred candidate in that three-person race (special election). Please see this article: ‘https://mustreadalaska.com/election-analyst-begich-would-win-head-to-head-with-either-peltola-or-palin-if-he-could-get-to-a-head-to-head/
I still think RCV is better than what we do now, but understand that it can occasionally suffer a (rare?) spoiler scenario. I don’t care much for RCV, but prefer approval voting or STAR voting.
Thank you, AK Pilot, for the compliments.
Thanks, Shank, for your opinions.
Ranked-choice voting effectively disenfranchises voters by allowing the election of marginal candidates who are not the voters’ first choice, or not supported by voter majority.
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RCV interferes with traditionally open elections by hiding critical process parts from voters and election observers.
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RCV is sponsored by ultra-liberal political donors and activists whose agenda is reinventing elections for their exclusive purposes.
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RCV is advertised as a method by which voters are asked to rank every candidate in a race, first to last choice. In a five-candidate race for example, a voter ranks candidates one to five, one first, five last.
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If no candidate wins a majority in ballot tabulation, the candidate with fewest votes is eliminated.
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Voters who selected the eliminated candidate as their number one automatically have their votes changed to their number two, and another round of vote tabulation occurs.
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Note after the second round —the ballot audit trail no longer exists—. An audit trail is the step-by-step record by which ballots can be traced to their source.
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Note that machine vote-tabulation accuracy is reportedly verified by comparing only 5% of machine-tabulated ballots with manually tabulated ballots.
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A reasonable conclusion is that the accuracy of the other 95% of ballot counting can’t be verified.
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If no candidate wins a majority in the second round, the lowest-scoring candidate is again eliminated. Voters who selected that candidate as their top choice (or as their second choice if that voter’s top choice was eliminated after first round) have their ballots redistributed to their next choice. Another round of vote tabulation occurs.
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Candidate elimination, redistribution of ballots, and recounting occur until one of the remaining candidates achieves a majority.
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But that candidate may ultimately have been the second, third, fourth, or last choice of the majority of voters.
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This means a candidate, who was —not— the first choice of a majority of voters, could win.
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RCV is prone to errors:
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In Alameda County, California officials admitted two months after a 2022 school board election that they incorrectly tabulated RCV votes and certified the wrong person as winner. No election official noticed the mistake because of the overly complicated process of RCV vote counting until an outside advocacy group flagged the issue.
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In the 2021 New York mayor’s race, it took eight rounds of vote counting of the 10 candidates during two weeks’ time before a final winner was announced. By the eighth round, the ballots of more 140,000 voters had been thrown out because they did not completely rank all candidate choices; they were effectively disenfranchised due to the recognized problem of “ballot exhaustion,” which leads to disenfranchisement.
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Nearly one in three voters do not rank multiple candidates in RCV elections. Thus, if a voter does not rank all the candidates in a race, that voter’s ballot may be thrown out in subsequent rounds of vote tabulation. Since RCV makes the voting process more complicated, it’s also more likely that voters may make mistakes that will cause their ballots —not— to be counted.
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RCV forces voters to vote for and rank candidates —they do not support— if they want to ensure that their ballots are not discarded in multiple rounds of vote tabulation.
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In the 2022 U.S. House of Representatives general election in Alaska, it took three rounds of vote-counting before the Democrat candidate was declared winner over two Republican candidates —but not before more than 15,000 ballots were thrown out by the final round because those voters had not ranked all candidates in the race.
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In the August 2022 RCV special election for that seat, the two Republican candidates won 60% of the vote —yet the Democrat candidate was declared the winner after over 11,000 ballots were eliminated.
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In the 2018 Maine U.S. House of Representatives general election, the incumbent Republican congressman received the most first-choice votes but was defeated by his Democratic challenger in a second round of ballot tabulation after votes for two other third-party candidates were redistributed —and more than 8,000 voters’ ballots were discarded.
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The ultimate winner in RCV is often not the choice of a majority of voters who voted; instead, the candidate with an RCV “majority” may be first, second, third, or last choice of —only— those voters whose ballots remained in tabulation until the last count.
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That also means the winner of a multi-round, RCV election —won’t— have a genuine mandate from a majority of voters, which matters in a democracy where more and more voters distrust government.
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Eliminating the interval between general and run-off elections means voters don’t get the chance to re-examine the top two candidates and candidates don’t get the chance to re-educate voters about positions on issues, which means voters lose another chance to make a fully informed choice.
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Using RCV to eliminate runoffs does —not— guarantee faster, more economical election results because, as recent experience showed, multiple rounds of vote tabulation substantially delayed determination of a winner, and the delayed determination wasn’t more economical by any standard.
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RCV can’t be expected to fix existing problems of voter disenfranchisement through ballot harvesting, mail-in voting, ERIC-manipulated voter-registration rolls, vote-tabulation by non-secured machinery operating on proprietary software and firmware, or vote-tabulation processes opaque to all but experienced forensic-data analysts.
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Whether RCV was intended to obfuscate the existing problem is unclear. What seems obvious is a return to manual-count, traditional election processes, monitored by observers who know what they’re observing, is overdue.
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Bottom line: Voters and state legislators should oppose RCV because it inserts unnecessary confusion, unnecessarily complicates the election process, results in marginal candidates winning elections, and produces questionable election results which can not be forensically audited.
In the final analyses the one thing that really impacts my outlook on RCV other than the obvious manipulation, is the delay in results. When you have a simple “one person one vote” system you KNOW by the end of election night who won or have a reasonable idea. Not so with RCV, as the system is predicated on having to count ALL votes together, since in subsequent counts just a few choices can change the outcome. This delay not only gives rise to speculation, but also erodes the trust the public has in the system and in my opinion is prone to manipulation. If elections were only in-person elections on election day and all mailed ballots receiving deadline would be a week prior to election day to allow for vetting and printing correct precinct lists, I suppose that issue could be eliminated.
Our old system has worked for over 200 years.
Many would argue that it hasn’t. See comments above by myself and Mr. Shank.
RCV essentially sanctifies vote tabulators, which have in many instances been shown to be NOT constructed and appointed as the are purported to be. It is difficult to discern if they are internet connected, the ‘software’ is prone to manipulation by updates, in many locales nationwide the software was ‘updated’ just prior to and shortly after the elections. They are an easy target for manipulation, with excellent potential to cover the tracks of the perpetrators. They, along with any process that absolutely necessitates their use is worthy of being relegated to the trash heap.
Do we have enough signatures collected and verified to put the issue of ranked choice voting on the ballot? When would it be on the ballot? Please keep this issue in view .
If rank-choice voting doesn’t get removed, we must rally behind one Conservative candidate that can unify the Alaskan Republican Party.
Peltola is nothing but a Pawn that is controlled.
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