While most corporate media coverage of last week’s Republican National Committee (RNC) meeting was devoted to the contested leadership race between Ronna McDaniel and Harmeet Dhillon, the organization’s conference yielded a significant win for election integrity.
During the meeting, RNC members unanimously passed a resolution rejecting the use of ranked-choice voting (RCV) in U.S. elections. In an RCV system, 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 receives a majority of votes.
“Traditional American primary and general elections ensure that voters who support one candidate, not a plurality of candidates, are heard clearly while ranked choice voting schemes open elections to ‘ballot exhaustion’ or the disenfranchisement of voters who choose not to support multiple candidates who do not clearly represent their values,” the RNC resolution reads. The committee voted to reject RCV and “similar schemes that increase election distrust, and voter suppression and disenfranchisement, eliminate the historic political party system, and put elections in the hands of expensive election schemes that cost taxpayers and depend exclusively on confusing technology and unelected bureaucrats to manage it.”
As The Federalist’s Victoria Marshall has reported, the push for RCV is primarily being driven by Democrat activist groups and moderate Republicans as a means of electing establishment candidates over more populist, conservative ones. In Alaska, centrist Republican Sen.
