ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS SNUBS ‘ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE’
In an editorial published Saturday that slapped Alaskans in the face, the Anchorage Daily News turned its back on “one person, one vote,” and endorsed the machinations of Ballot Measure 2, which most analysts say will help liberal candidates get a stronger toehold in the state.
Critics say ranked choice voting gives some voters more votes than others, depending on how many they rank on the ballot and whether their ballot becomes “exhausted” during the counting process, which is all done by computer programmed to sort and reassign votes.
The measure on the Nov. 3 ballot also destroys the ability of Alaskans to effectively form political parties and platforms, because it takes primaries wide open.
The measure is backed by nearly 100 percent of funds from Outside liberal groups to set up an election system that clearly favors liberals. Or, as the editorial board of the ADN benignly describes it “most of the money financing the ‘yes’ side of the campaign has itself come from Outside.”
“Our elections are not serving us well,” the editorial board waxed.
That’s because radical leftists and promise-breakers are not competing well. Democrats are competing so poorly that they now try to run away from the Democrat Party just to get people to vote for them.
That’s not the system that’s broken — that is the Alaska Democratic Party, now so radical that even clearly Democrat candidates for U.S. Senate and House try to trick voters into thinking they are independents.
The editorial board believes Alaskans are stupid, and don’t vote for the candidates that the newspaper thinks they should be voting for. The paper clearly believes the new system will produce the kind of results the elites in the news business want to see, not the results Alaskans want.
Ballot Measure 2 is three paragraphs long but represents 25 pages and 75 sections of legislation that its liberal backers say would improve Alaska’s election system.
Those 25 pages were written by two Alaskans: Scott Kendall and Libby Bakalar. On Friday during a recorded debate, Kendall for the first time disclosed the name of the co-author of the measure.
Bakalar was fired by the Dunleavy Administration and has an active lawsuit against the administration for wrongful termination. She runs a far left blog and is an overachieving Twitter commenter who espouses leftist positions.
The entire selling point of the measure by these two liberal lawyers is to eliminate dark money, but it wasn’t until four days before the election that the group calling itself Alaskans for Better Elections disclosed who actually wrote the ballot measure. Not very transparent.
The ranked choice voting idea is so bad that even California Gov. Jerry Brown had vetoed a bill that would have expanded it, calling it “overly complicated and confusing” because it “deprives voters of genuinely informed choice.”
In ranked-choice voting, you don’t vote just for the candidate you want. You rank the candidates according to who you can settle for, from 1-4.
If no candidate wins a majority of #1 votes, all the ballots get reshuffled, and those with the fewest votes drop off, and that vote gets reassigned, according to a complicated formula. If you don’t pick a second choice, your ballot is exhausted and thrown out. Those who did pick a second, third, and fourth choice get to vote more than once.
On Friday, Defend Alaska Elections issued their own editorial, in the form of a YouTube video, demonstrating how Alaskans are being outspent and outplayed by Outsiders trying to take over the state and how they are fighting back:
