It's Time to End Alaska's Ranked-Choice Experiment
Contributed by Chuck Campbell
In 2020, Alaska voted to replace our election system with something called ranked-choice voting. In 2022, almost instantly after our first election under this system, a group called Alaskans for Honest Elections began work on a petition to remove this system and restore Alaska’s previous system of party primaries.
You should sign this petition. To understand why, let’s take a look at the recent history of ranked-choice voting in the US. It’s easy. Just follow the money – straight to wealthy radical donors using it to protect their status quo from the will of the people.
Using Ballotpedia and InfluenceWatch, I was able to find that the nominal prime mover behind the initiative was Alaskans for Better Elections, but they function mostly as a conduit for out-of-state non-governmental organizations. These are organizations, usually non-profit, that large-scale donors can use to hide their influence – in other words, the infrastructure of dark money. Alaskans for Better Elections itself is also riddled with extreme leftists, along with at least one Murkowski connection.
Some of the outside influences which supported Alaskans for Better Elections or the ballot measure directly are themselves worth looking into. For example, the Action Now Initiative, a supporter of Alaska’s RCV measure and a contributor to Alaskans for Better Elections, was founded by former Enron executive John Arnold with his wife Laura. You really couldn’t make this stuff up. According to InfluenceWatch, they have funded many other organizations that support RCV and Alaskans for Better Elections.
FairVote, a beneficiary of Action Now Initiative and a supporter of Alaska’s RCV ballot measure, is one of the largest promoters of RCV nationally and has received funding from multiple George Soros and Pierre Omidyar foundations. Many other big-name far-left donors can be found as well, including the heavy-hitting Tides Foundation, which operates openly as a pass-through – its founder once stated, “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.”
George Soros, for those not familiar, is a billionaire financier who mixes radical leftism with shameless profiteering on a very high level. On his investing, he has said, “As an anonymous participant in financial markets, I never had to weigh the social consequences of my actions... I felt justified in ignoring them on the grounds that I was playing by the rules.” He also once told a reporter, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” Pierre Omidyar, likewise, funds the far left with the proceeds from his own capitalist ventures – he is the founder of eBay and became a billionaire when it went public.
Represent.Us is one of the more interesting organizations to support RCV in Alaska. Several far-left celebrities work closely with this organization, and among nine important members mentioned on InfluenceWatch, you will find two entertainers, one financial advisor, a UC Berkeley big shot, a campaign finance reform activist, and four former power players in Big Tech or Big Tech-adjacent spaces. Two of the latter hypocritically participate in the same kind of major political funding that the organization criticizes.
Another supporter of Alaska’s RCV proposition was Democracy for America, a Howard Dean-founded PAC that supported the farthest-out of far leftists. Unfortunately, though the PAC itself ran out of money (and provided more unintentional comedy in the process as its CEO attended both “leadership training paid for by the organization and a personal multi-day sommelier education course” while telling staff that the foundation was going down), a sister organization is still operational and plans to continue pushing RCV.
Come to think of it, why are all these national interests, based in Texas, Massachusetts, Maryland, and others, so interested in our far-off, low-population state? Do they really care about us that much?
Getting dark money out of Alaska, my foot. Alaska’s ranked-choice fiasco is entirely a product of dark money – and, as Project Veritas discovered, of Murkowski machinations.
Lisa Murkowski is no stranger to cynical politics. In 2010, for example, she won as an “independent write-in” candidate after losing the Republican primary. This was at least partially accomplished by combining Republicans who still voted on name recognition (or fell for the mainstream-media narratives that were taking shape even then) with Democrats who saw Murkowski as being both on their side and more likely to win than the official Democrat. In 2020, however, after many of her stances (including support for abortion, Trump’s second partisan impeachment, and the anti-development Interior Secretary Deb Haaland) angered the base, her staff began to push RCV. It would ensure she couldn’t be primaried and make her strategy of “be the losing side’s backup plan” a surefire path to victory. Emma Ashlock, one of her campaign coordinators, was caught saying so on Project Veritas’ undercover camera.
In terms of results, RCV delivered – for the dark-money donors and cynical operatives who supported it. The final results of the November 8 election weren’t certified until November 30, and once they were, they were a horror show. Murkowski’s strategy of coasting on second-choice votes from the Democrat had worked perfectly, while over in the house, Peltola had overcome the dueling Republicans Begich and Palin.
This highlights another problem with ranked-choice voting. Due to the nature of open primaries and RCV, it’s difficult to even tell how or why the results ended up the way they did. How many Democrats ranked Murkowski first because they knew their candidate couldn’t win? How many Begich supporters ranked Peltola (or threw their votes away) out of induced spite for Palin? We’ll never know. This opacity makes it impossible to accurately read the political leanings of a population, but very easy for the guardians of approved opinion to say the people wanted their policies.
I suppose it could have been worse. It could have been like the 2010 Oakland, California mayoral race, which required nine rounds of counting to select a winner who had received 25,000 fewer first-choice votes than the first-round leader.
The worst part is, the ballot measure which gave us RCV was only allowed in the first place because of judicial activism. Alaska Statute 14.45.045 clearly states, in reference to initiatives, “the bill shall be confined to one subject” – not one “umbrella”. 2020’s Ballot Measure 2 violated the plain meaning of this law by containing three provisions: ranked-choice voting, open primaries, and new campaign-contribution disclosure requirements. I shouldn’t have to point out that there is a wide gulf between campaign finance laws and election procedures.
This violation of the law enabled the measure to be packaged deceptively and was integral to its eventual passage. Ballot Measure 2 was sold to the public on its campaign-finance provisions, not on its convoluted, difficult-to-sell election redesign. If the promoters of this measure had been forced to follow the law and split Ballot Measure 2, the campaign-finance part of it would likely still have passed, but the imposition of ranked-choice voting, which was the true purpose of the measure, would have had a much tougher fight.
Ranked-choice voting, a pure product of outside interests and only able to proceed because of judicial activism, was and is a mistake. Much like “management by consensus”, it’s built to deliver results that satisfy no one – and that’s when it isn’t being abused by schemers who speak out of both sides of their mouths. Alaskans for Better Elections is still out there, trying to make RCV sound like an improvement over the previous system. They know they could still lose – so show them how easily.
Let’s help Alaskans for Honest Elections put our state back in the control group of this failing experiment.