By TERRENCE SHANIGAN
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is one of the most deceptive systems ever imposed on Alaskans. This system is unconstitutional on multiple grounds and undermines democratic principles. It was sold by out-of-state sponsors to the public with misleading claims and implemented by a partisan Division of Elections director, raising serious concerns about neutrality and fairness.
RCV, rooted in century-old European systems, is used primarily for local and legislative elections in democratic socialist countries—not for electing heads of state. These nations prefer simpler two-round runoff systems, like Alaska’s former method, to avoid RCV’s complexity, manipulation risks, and tendency to elevate less-qualified candidates. Using RCV for presidential elections is unconstitutional. It conflicts with the Electoral College, which the progressive left opposes, and violates equal voting rights protections.
The Constitution mandates the Electoral College, not a redistributed popular vote, to elect the president. RCV alters how states achieve majority outcomes, directly conflicting with the Constitution’s allocation of powers to states and Congress. Alaska’s leaders must step up and challenge the certification of this election to protect constitutional integrity and electoral fairness.
RCV exacerbates disparities in how votes are counted through unequal voting power across states. Alaska’s implementation of RCV caused inconsistencies, while other states retained their traditional head-to-head systems, which interfered with vote processing and conflicts with redistribution for the Electoral College.
Ballot exhaustion—a common issue in RCV—occurs when voters do not rank enough candidates, and their ballot is excluded in later rounds, disenfranchising thousands of Alaskan voters in a national election and violating the principle of equal representation. The Division of Elections does not track the tens of thousands of exhausted or rejected votes, but the numbers are staggering.
RCV’s ballot exclusion and rejection rates are 10 times higher than head-to-head elections, according to the Social Science Research Network. The high ballot rejection rates violate the Equal Protection Clause and impose a burden on voters with its unjust system that undermines the democratic process.
The ability to rank multiple candidates in RCV, touted as granting more choice, actually gives unequal weight to votes in successive rounds when redistributed, violating the “one person, one vote” principle from the 1964 case Reynolds v. Sims. This unfair system undermines equal representation. In the United States, voting has always meant casting a single vote. Under RCV, voters, for losing candidates, effectively gain a second, third, or fourth vote, creating an unequal system that contradicts the democratic ideal of fairness and equality in the electoral process.
RCV ballots fail to provide write-in spots equal to the number of ranking slots, coercing voters into selecting only pre-listed candidates and restricting their ability to choose non-listed options freely. This limitation violates democratic principles, as Reynolds v. Sims stated: “The right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society.” By offering insufficient write-in slots, RCV prioritizes pre-selected candidates, creating inconsistency, undermining fairness, and limiting voter representation. This coercive restriction unconstitutionally promotes undue influence and unequal treatment in the electoral process.
RCV’s sponsors knowingly misled Alaskans with deceptive messaging, targeting groups like Alaska Natives, rural residents, deployed military members, and mail-in voters who supported it most. Many Alaska Natives still lack the facts about RCV’s negative impacts on their tendency to vote by mail. It dilutes policy platforms and sidelines well-qualified leaders in favor of broadly “acceptable” but less capable candidates. If more voters understood how RCV undermines electoral quality and effective governance, they might reconsider supporting this flawed system that sacrifices strong leadership for superficial inclusivity.
The claim that open primaries are liberating and allow voters to choose freely is misleading. Open primaries encourage cross-party interference, where voters from one party strategically vote for weaker candidates in another party to manipulate outcomes. This undermines the integrity of the process. Closed or semi-closed primaries prevent such interference by limiting participation to registered party members, ensuring the selection process is aligned with party values.
I support competition and more parties, but open primaries undermine ideological coherence. Parties are not mere “clubs” but represent policy and core beliefs platforms, giving voters clarity about candidates’ ideologies. Open primaries blur these distinctions, reducing party labels to empty symbols. It would be like allowing Russia to choose the U.S. Olympic team—outsiders influencing decisions that should reflect our values. In the same way, RCV weakens the party system, dilutes voter understanding, and undermines the integrity of elections, making it harder for voters to align with candidates who truly represent their beliefs.
RCV sponsors claim to improve democracy, but their push to eliminate closed primaries erases the foundational philosophies that guide party candidates. It allows parties without broad appeal to exploit the system, diluting meaningful policy debates. The process of parties conducting their primaries and presenting candidates under their banners gives voters clarity and a basis for informed decisions.
Open primaries strip voters of this clarity, making party affiliations like “R” or “D” irrelevant. Voters should beware of systems that aim to destroy ideological accountability and the policy foundations that define representative democracy. RCV weakens democratic accountability because candidates are not directly accountable to their party’s voters, who are most invested in their success.
The claim that Alaskans are protected from outside money is a lie exposed by the reporting of liberal progressives from the Lower 48 spending nearly $13 million to manipulate Alaska’s electoral system, aiming to influence national elections. Alaska urgently needs election fiscal reform to protect our unique way of life from progressive D.C. special interests intent on colonizing us politically.
RCV has introduced countless ways to exclude ballots while relying on Dominion Voting Systems, raising serious concerns about data security, tabulation trustworthiness, and manipulation. Why did the Division of Elections insist on Dominion machines, and why did the lieutenant governor approve this purchase without public comment? This system fosters exclusion, blocks hand-counting, and erodes transparency.
RCV’s complexity leads to higher rejection rates, particularly for mail-in voters, amplifying disenfranchisement risks. The destructive impact of RCV has left Alaska with a system that prioritizes mediocrity and injects confusion over fairness and clarity. Returning to a strong, traditional head-to-head system is critical to restore trust, transparency, and integrity. Alaskans deserve better leadership to drive this change.
Terrence Shanigan is a lifelong Alaskan of Sugpiaq descent from Bristol Bay. He is also the co-founder of Mission Critical, is a combat veteran, an honored husband and a dedicated father.
RCV brought Eric Hafner out of his cell to the ballot box for awhile…
Every convicted criminal at least deserves a shot at winning the lottery.
I didn’t read this article because I already knew. if some organization is throwing that much money around, especially from down below, I smell a rat.
Alright Terrence, thank you and you have my vote for Governor.
Regarding write-ins and rank voting, there is a threshold that must be met (I can’t recall the exact percentage) in order to even count write-in votes. That means if you write-in a candidate and there aren’t a sufficient number of write-ins then your vote is never actually counted, it is simply discarded as chaff.
any limits imposed by the division of elections through regulation or through an improper statute, doesn’t make them constitutional. It just means I’ve been challenged yet and right now our election system has three looming constitutional challenges. One is with the right votes. The second is rank choice voting is in conflict with the electoral college and the third one is counting ballots that you’ve received after election day.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Sorry. This whole thing continues to make me shake my head. What we need is funding and PR strategy to kill this once and for all. Not more people stating what most people already know.
many people know they don’t like it and they know it’s wrong and they have a belief that it’s got to be unconstitutional, but most people do not understand the nuances and the detail of the legal argument that invalidates this scheme. So although it might be obvious to you it isn’t as clear for many people, and we have to continue to educate and reinforce and layout and extremely simple terms the parts of this that violate our constitution or open such a account of forms of corruption that even the people that continue to support it this last election cycle we’ll see why it’s a detrimental scheme in American society.
Well done. Now let’s outlaw RCV as other states have.
I dislike the confusing, disenfranchising, corrupt RCV voting system with all my heart. Shame on Alaska and our political leaders who, so far, refuse to aid in repealing it.
I can’t understand why our governor and lieutenant governor and legislators aren’t speaking up in opposition against this? they need to be vocal and put their weight behind getting rid of something like this but silent and that’s frustrating as an Alaskan.
Terrence is spot-on regarding RCV with one exception: it is not “unconstitutional” from the federal perspective. It might be from the state, or at least may be flying in the face of statutory law in this regard, which admittedly I have not looked up. The federal gov’t empowers the state legislatures to devise the manner in which they choose electors. They could play spin-the-bottle, empower the governor to make appointments, or WHATEVER, but since 1824, all states allow the voting citizens to make the choice. Maine and Nebraska allow each congressional district to do so. Imagine if we went back to the old system, where the legislature chose the electors. Would we have RINOs in that regard, when legislators would know they would have HELL to pay if they broke party ranks?
Bob all of the caselaw points to RCV being unconstitutional at the federal level particularly with the presidential races and races for US Senate and for Congress. Because it conflicts with the electoral college, which is only use of the federal level it also violates a number of federal laws relating to Wright in candidates and when you look at the new Mississippi federal court ruling that’s not having an impact in California you cannot count ballots that were received after the closing of the polls on election day. Right now Alaska statute says that you can postmark them and they can be received up to 10 days that’s fine but you can’t count any of them because federal law and the courts have now ruled on that on October 24. There are three reasons why we have some constitutional violations at the federal level. at the state level we’re just a mess because the dictionary is getting involved with elections when they shouldn’t be and they’re countering the legislative branch and the executive branch is staying silent, which makes you think that they sort of support all of the stuff that’s going on, but if they don’t, then, why aren’t they speaking up about it?
My guess is that the AI has not advanced to the point where it knows how to punctuate your talk as text, and when you said judiciary it heard dictionary. This may be partly attributable to your enunciation. Just guessing.
One more thing Bob these federal courts are ruling that the state statues are inconsistent with federal election law so I have a local level. There are a few teeth for those federal requirements to take place except when things like writing candidates that applies across the board but when you’re dealing with conflict of the electoral college and re-distribution of votes in giving people more than one vote for a candidate when the electoral college is built around one vote per person. There are some of these things that impact the state level and some of them impact the federal level and this is where we need to have some clear discussion but our state attorney general is silent on this issue and we should see more activity from that office.
Yes RCV is a deceptive scheme… it is also what we are going to have to deal with. If it couldn’t be defeated after everyone saw how it worked and had a Republican Presidential candidate who would draw sympathetic voters to the cause out, it won’t be defeated in the next election. A far more valuable effort would be to figure out why it lost and why state legislative candidates performed worse than Trump. Think about that. Candidates with very similar views and apparent values but without the heavy baggage of personal issues President Trump brings to the table PERFORMED WORSE THAN TRUMP. Hard to imagine but we need to know why. How does a minority like the Democrats continue to wield such power? They don’t go off in 10 different directions, they are very focused and strategic and don’t have the silly purity tests that Republicans seem to insist on. And you may have noticed they win. If two more Republicans win in the house and one more in the senate and the state would be in a very different position. Republicans can’t keep blaming fraud and vote counting and RCV for this. In the relatively small races good people are going to the polls but not supporting the candidates they should. That isn’t a conspiracy, that is poor messaging and voter turnout to start. This is somewhat of a war and to win wars you have to figure out how to win battles and what battles are worth fighting and are they likely wins. Stop with the excuses and name calling, recognize where we are and what we have to do to get there. People and resources are limited, figure out the best way to deploy them.
there were only a couple of races where ranked choice voting was demonstrated in this 2024 election cycle.
Many of the races went uncontested and that’s a shame because under choice voting we should have no uncontested racist.
And I know that in some strategies of rank the red it works sometimes if you have a race or you have one strong Democrat, and you’re running a moderate Republican and a conservative Republican, for example, in a place like Juneau that Republican stands a chance of beating the strong Democrat because they will attract a lot of second-place Republican vote some first place, but a lot of second-place Republican votes and they may also receive a lot of second-place democrat votes so just depends on where you’re at.
The problem is it’s designed to water down the system and dilute the quality of the person you’re selecting and so we end up with a milk toast and that’s mediocrity, and that’s what we have in the legislators right now — bunch of milk toast people that get elected and they don’t match up with the values of most Alaska, but they’re generally OK for people.
“uncontested racist” Phewww, lads. The lexicon has been searching for this particular phrase.
RCV is the love child of the Uniparty!
It was my understanding that the votes in Alaska are hand counted. Is this not correct?
No, you are not correct Ray. The Mat-Su Borough hand counts its local races. The entire state ships its ballots to Juneau to be counted by machines AFTER “all of the votes come in” 100 days after the election is over.
Terrence, I attended the MSB School of Government mtg last night and listened to you speak about RCV. I heard some things that I agree with, some things that I don’t agree with AND I believe I watched you purposely draw out your talk by telling stories to keep the Q&A time at the end from happening.
Some points that stuck in my mind that i don’t agree with:
-You support the use of open-source electronic voting machines.
-You suggest adding more groups/specialists/processes to make the electronic voting system more secure.
-Moreover, you were saying that errors can happen with hand counting.
-The last half hour of the meeting was opened for a Q&A session. During this time, you started telling stories and this ate up the Q&A time. You finished your stories when there were only minutes left. David Eastman wanted to ask a question; because we ran short on time, the meeting coordinator decided that this was the time that chairs needed to be stacked. So, David Eastman’s question was not heard by the attendees because of the noise and commotion. My comment and question and another person’s comment and question were not heard by the attendees because of the noise and commotion.
We all had to line up for the Q&A time, so there is no doubt that you were aware of the people waiting for their turn at the microphone.
My comments that I wanted to share:
We chose to have paper ballots and hand counting in the MSB. Many do not trust the machines. We voted to get rid of the machines. After the MSB People had successfully voted to get rid of the machines, the borough assembly, on their own, chose to buy some scanners and pc computers to “count” the number of ballots . MSB People are questioning why the assembly did bought these machines right after we voted to get rid of ALL machines.
Why are you attempting to convince the people that the machines are helpful and hand counting is open to errors? The machines can be manipulated and can make errors also.
You suggested dumping more money into making the electronic voting system more secure by adding groups/specialists and processes. How about if we concentrate on coming up with a hand counting system that everyone is comfortable with and get multiple teams trained in the different stages of the counting/verification process? How about if we concentrate on training a sufficient number of poll workers and poll watchers and start this process a year in advance of the next election, so that we know we have enough trained people. The borough is struggling with the hand counting process – not because it doesn’t work, but because the borough is shorting itself on time to properly prepare for a smooth-running election using hand counting. This struggle makes people want to go back to using the machines because “they are faster.” Faster does not mean better or more honest.
The Mat-Su Borough People voted to get rid of all machines. We expect the Borough to honor this and to help run a smooth, efficient election. The People need to get involved so that if the Borough and the State cannot provide fair and honest elections, the People will be ready to take back the election process that we should have never given up our responsibility for in the first place.
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