In the lead-up to the 2020 election, out-of-state dark money poured into Alaska to hijack the state’s elections by tricking voters into implementing a ranked-choice voting system. Now, following a midterm election fraught with record-low turnout and confused voters, Alaska’s conservatives are fighting to take back control of their state’s electoral process.
Known as Alaskans for Honest Elections, the grassroots organization is leading a statewide signature-collecting effort to put an initiative on the 2024 ballot to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system, which voters narrowly adopted in 2020. Last month, Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom certified the group’s application for a petition to repeal RCV, meaning the organization may now begin collecting signatures from voters across the state. The group must get nearly 27,000 valid signatures in order for the initiative to appear on the ballot for the 2024 contest.
“We’ve put together over 5,000 volunteers who will be gathering [signatures] all over the state,” Art Mathias, who’s helping spearhead the signature drive, told The Federalist. “We’re going to be at several outdoor shows, boating shows.” We have volunteers who will “go to their friends, to their churches, to the shopping malls. Wherever people come through, [they’ll] collect signatures.”
Under RCV, which critics call “rigged-choice voting,” voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. Such a process continues until one candidate
