Efforts to repeal ranked-choice voting (RCV) in Alaska are proving confusing, and chaotic — just like RCV itself. But a disturbing question lies just beyond the pro-RCV and anti-election lobby smoke bombs: Does the Alaskan government have a tacit hand in silencing concerned citizens?
Ranked-choice voting is profoundly complicated to explain, which in itself should be a giant red flag. It is a proposed change to our voting system pushed nationwide by some Republican operatives as well as left-wing organizations determined to influence election outcomes through process changes — funded by politically power-hungry billionaires (see Gehl and Arnold funding).
Instead of voting for a single candidate of their choice, the RCV system has voters rank each candidate in order of preference, which can often mean ranking both Democrat and Republican candidates. If no candidate manages to acquire more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the candidate who places last is eliminated, and his or her votes are redistributed to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This complex process — which continues until a candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote — is prone to error and has often led to some voters having their ballots discarded.
Five states have banned RCV, and the American Legislative Exchange Council has created model legislation (the “Save Act”) to make it easy for others to follow. The Republican National Committee also officially opposes RCV.
The end game for ideologically progressive billionaires seems to be eliminating party preference politics so
