Alaska Still Counting Primary Votes Thanks to Ranked Choice Voting System

Well, you can’t say we didn’t warn you, Alaska.

As of this writing, voters already know the outcomes of all the special elections and primary elections in New York and Florida that took place Aug. 23. But nobody has any idea who won Alaska’s special House election held a week prior. In fact, the outcome won’t be known until next month.

Why?

Because Alaska went and adopted the idiotic, needlessly complicated ranked choice voting system in a 2020 referendum that just barely passed. Voters might want to consider a do-over and rank “no” first on their ballots this time, except that wouldn’t guarantee that it would lose.

Based on past experience with this system, it takes weeks to sort out even the simplest election result. This is already happening with the three-way race in the state’s special election. It is only slight hyperbole to say that the outcome of this special election race will be determined with barely any time for the winner to be sworn in since it’s up again in the November election. Meanwhile, state election officials and the media are trying to gaslight Alaskans, telling them that this is a good thing.

Ranked choice voting has been tried in enough cities and states by now that it’s safe to say it is a silly system that no one should bother with. It causes voters who actually show up and bother to vote to be disenfranchised at alarming rates, mostly just because the system is so confusing and counterintuitive. It’s much easier for voters to choose one candidate than to rank multiple candidates, and as a result, many of them stop ranking after one or two. As a result, nearly 9% of all ballots cast in San Francisco’s 2018 mayor’s race were thrown out before the final count — you know, the one that actually counts. In New York City’s 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, 140,000 out of the 940,000 votes cast were discarded before the final round.

Speaking of which, here’s a head-scratcher about that contest. Voters were asked who their top choice was. The third-place finisher on that question ended up knocking out the second-place finisher at some point in the interminable, incomprehensible counting process. She then came within 7,200 votes of defeating the first-place finisher as New York Democrats’ favored nominee. This is what ranked choice voting is really about — someone’s third- or fourth-best choice ends up winning, and nobody understands how.

This is just one example of all the latent absurdities that ranked choice voting creates. As for its alleged benefits, it only marginally increased turnout in New York’s Democratic primary since the last time there was a meaningful and competitive Democratic primary — in 2015. The increase nearly vanishes if you don’t count the votes that got thrown out.

If voters are really unhappy with the traditional first-past-the-post system, they should adopt runoff elections. There are several versions much easier for voters to understand than ranked choice voting and that produce rational results in a reasonable amount of time.

Massachusetts voters may not know much, but they wisely rejected ranked choice voting in 2020. Alaskans and Mainers should follow suit and throw out this dumb system the next chance they get.