Opinion: Alaska Republicans and Democrats are both pushing back on ranked choice voting

In November 2022, in Alaska’s first election using a ranked choice voting system, Democrat Mary Peltola, a little-known former Alaska state representative from Bethel, was elected to replace Republican Don Young as Alaska’s sole U.S. representative in the House of Representatives.

Two years later, Alaska Republican Party Chairwoman Carmela Warfield, still bewildered by Peltola’s victory, promised that the party would “use all of our resources to stop ranked-choice voting” and “take back our only seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.” To that end, Alaskans for Fair Elections, founded by a fundamentalist pastor in South Anchorage, has collected more than 37,000 signatures on a bill to repeal ranked-choice voting. If at least 26,000 of those signatures are deemed valid, the measure will appear on the ballot in this November’s general election.

In contrast, leaders of the Alaska Democratic Party, still thrilled by Peltola’s victory, support ranked-choice voting. Kay Brown, former executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party, who once abhorred ranked-choice voting, now says she “cannot really argue with the results we’ve seen.” And current executive director Lindsay Kavanaugh recently emailed party members to warn that ranked-choice voting will be on the ballot because “Alaska Republicans opposed approval of a ballot measure that would eliminate ranked-choice voting in Alaska” because they were “outraged that we defied the odds and sent Democrat Mary Peltola to Congress in 2022.”

But leaders of both parties say the opposite: Mary Peltola’s election was a one-off, and that ranked-choice voting should normally favor Republican candidates and harm Democrats in statewide office, not the other way around.

In the 2020 general election, Alaska voters approved Ballot Measure 2, a measure establishing a ranked choice voting system, by 3,781 votes out of more than 344,000 cast.

The group that backed the campaign, Alaskans for Better Votes, spent about $7 million (most of it from a few ultra-wealthy out-of-state donors) to promote Ballot Measure 2 as a good government reform that would “right a rigged political system” by giving “every Alaskan the freedom to vote for the candidate of their choice.”

But the plan to replace party primaries with ranked choice voting was actually a plan devised by Scott Kendall, an Anchorage lawyer and longtime aide to Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, to allow Murkowski, who is generally popular but disliked by much of the far-right rank-and-file of the Alaska Republican Party, to run for reelection in 2022 without having to compete against Kelly Tshibaka, the Donald Trump-backed MAGA candidate, in a Republican primary that she would almost certainly lose.

And the plan worked.

The ranked-choice voting system created a “jungle” primary, in which Lisa competed against Kelly Tshibaka and 17 other candidates in August 2022. The top four vote-getters – Murkowski, Tshibaka, Republican Buzz Kelly, and Democrat Patricia Chesbro – advanced to the general election in November, where Murkowski narrowly defeated Tshibaka by 2,017 votes. However, because Murkowski received only 43.39% of the total votes, a second round of ranked-choice voting was held. At the end of the second round, Murkowski won the election with 53.70% of the vote, beating Tshibaka by 18,796 votes. However, in the second round, more than 20,000 Democrats and independents who had voted for the Democratic candidate Chesbro voted for Murkowski as their second choice.

Peltola benefited from the same system, but her election victory was nonetheless a result of fortunate and special circumstances.

Twenty-two candidates competed in the “jungle primary” for Alaska’s only U.S. House seat, with Democrat Peltola coming in first, Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III coming in second and third, and Libertarian Chris Bayh coming in fourth.

In the November general election, Peltola again came in first, Sala second, Begich third and Bayh fourth. However, because Peltola received less than 50% of the vote, a second round of ranked choice voting was held.

If the voters who voted for Begich in the second round had also voted for Palin, a fellow Republican, as their second choice, Palin would have won the election by more than 2,000 votes. However, after a year of openly exchanging abuse, the rift between Begich and Palin had become so severe that not only did 21,371 Republicans and independents who voted for Begich refuse to vote for Palin as their second choice, but 7,477 of them voted for Peltola as their second choice.

Many of the voters who voted for Begich, and the 1,031 who voted for Libertarian Bayh as their first choice but Peltola as their second choice, did so because aides to Don Young, who had no use for Begich and little for Palin, advised Peltola, whose policy views were unfamiliar to most Republican, libertarian, center-right and far-right independent voters, to promote himself as the general election approached as a reincarnation of the mukluk-wearing Don Young. Peltola is a liberal Democrat; Young was a staunch conservative Republican during his nearly half-century tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The results of the 2022 Senate and House elections have obscured a key lesson these elections have to teach about ranked-choice voting systems: They eliminate multi-candidate general elections, which have historically favored Democratic candidates running for statewide office and disadvantaged Republican candidates.

For example, in the 1982 gubernatorial election, Democrat Bill Sheffield defeated Republican Tom Fink by 17,627 votes in an election in which the Libertarian and Alaska Independence Party candidates Dick Randolph and Joe Vogler (both significantly more conservative than Fink) received a combined 32,302 votes. In a ranked-choice election, the majority of Randolph and Vogler’s voters would have voted for Fink as their second choice, and Fink, not Sheffield, would have won the election.

Similarly, in the 1994 gubernatorial election, Democrat Tony Knowles defeated Republican Jim Campbell by just 683 votes, in which Alaska Independence and Patriot Party candidates Jack Coghill and Ralph Winterlow (both significantly more conservative than Campbell) received a combined 29,581 votes, while Green Party candidate Jim Sykes, who was significantly more liberal than Knowles, received 8,727 votes. In a ranked-choice election, the majority of Sykes voters would have voted for Tony Knowles as their second choice, but the majority of Coghill and Winterlow voters would have voted for Jim Campbell as their second choice, and Campbell, not Knowles, would have won the election.

Finally, Democrat Mark Begich defeated Republican Ted Stevens by 3,953 votes in the 2008 Alaska State Senate election, in which Alaska Independence and Libertarian Party candidates Bob Byrd and Frederick Haase (both of whom were significantly more conservative than Stevens) received a combined 15,680 votes. In a ranked-choice election, most of Byrd and Haase’s voters would likely have voted for Ted Stevens as their second choice, even though Stevens had been convicted at the time. If they had done so, Stevens, not Begich, would have won the election.

These hypothetical ranked-choice voting results show that, barring extraordinary circumstances like those that determined the outcomes of Alaska’s 2022 Senate and House elections, in a state where the electorate skews from center-right to far-right and where Republicans outnumber Democrats nearly two to one, ranked-choice voting systems favor Republican candidates and harm Democratic candidates in statewide office elections.

Why Alaska’s Republican and Democratic leaders all came to the opposite conclusion is a puzzle that reaffirms the validity of Baltimore sage H.L. Mencken’s long-ago observation that “the most common folly is the fervent belief in something manifestly untrue.”

Donald Craig Mitchell He is an Anchorage attorney and the author of two books on the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and “Wampum: How Indian Tribes, the Mafia, and an Inattentive Congress Invented Indian Gaming and Created a $28 Billion Gambling Empire.”

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