OPINION: Alaska Republicans and Democrats both have ranked choice voting backward

In November 2022, in the first election conducted in Alaska using the ranked choice voting system, Democrat Mary Peltola, an obscure former member of the Alaska House of Representatives from Bethel, was elected to succeed Republican Don Young as Alaska’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Two years later, Alaska Republican Party chairwoman Carmela Warfield, still flummoxed that Peltola won, has promised that the party will “use all its resources to defeat ranked choice voting” and “take back our lone U.S. House seat.” To that end, Alaskans for Honest Elections, which the pastor of a fundamentalist church in South Anchorage created, has obtained more than 37,000 signatures for an initiative whose passage will repeal ranked choice voting. If at least 26,000 of those signatures are found to have been validly collected, the initiative will be on the general election ballot this November.

Conversely, leaders of the Alaska Democratic Party, still euphoric that Peltola won, support ranked choice voting. Kay Brown, the former executive director of the Alaska Democratic Party for whom ranked choice voting once was anathema, now says she “can’t really argue with the results we’ve seen.” And Lindsay Kavanaugh, the current executive director, recently emailed the party faithful to sound the alarm that “Ranked choice voting will be on the ballot after Alaska Republicans fought to approve a ballot measure that would repeal ranked choice voting in Alaska” because they were “furious when we defied the odds in 2022 and sent Democrat Mary Peltola to Congress.”

But the leaders of both parties have it backward. Mary Peltola’s election was a one-off and, in normal circumstances, the ranked-choice voting system benefits Republican candidates for statewide elective office and disadvantages Democratic candidates, rather than the other way around.

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

Alaskans for Better Elections, the group that sponsored the initiative, spent nearly $7 million (most of which had been contributed by a handful of mega-rich out-of-state donors) to advertise Ballot Measure 2 as a good government reform that would “unrig the political system” by giving “every Alaskan the freedom to vote for any candidate they want.”

But replacing political party primary elections with ranked-choice voting actually was a scheme that Anchorage attorney Scott Kendall, a longtime member of Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski’s inner circle, was instrumental in concocting to enable Murkowski, who while generally popular is reviled by most hard-right rank-and-file members of the Alaska Republican Party, to run for reelection in 2022 without having to compete against Kelly Tshibaka, the Donald Trump-endorsed MAGA candidate, in a Republican primary election that Murkowski almost certainly would have lost.

And the scheme worked.

The ranked choice voting system created a “jungle” primary election that was held in August 2022 in which Lisa competed against Kelly Tshibaka and 17 other candidates. The top four vote-getters — Murkowski, Tshibaka, Republican Buzz Kelly and Democrat Patricia Chesbro — then moved on to the November general election, which Murkowski narrowly won, finishing ahead of Tshibaka by 2,017 votes. But because Murkowski won only 43.39% of the total vote, there then were two ranked-choice voting rounds. At the end of the second round, Murkowski won the election with 53.70% of the vote, defeating Tshibaka by 18,796 votes. But in the second round, more than 20,000 Democrats and independents who had voted for Chesbro, the Democratic candidate, voted for Murkowski as their second choice.

While Peltola benefited from the same system, she still won the general election only because of a fortuitous special circumstance.

Twenty-two candidates competed in the ‘jungle primary’ election for Alaska’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Democrat Peltola finished first, Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III finished second and third, and Libertarian Chris Bye finished fourth.

In the November general election, Peltola again finished first, Sarah second, Begich third and Bye fourth. But since Peltola received less than 50% of the total vote, there were two ranked-choice voting rounds.

If, in the second round, the voters who had voted for Begich had voted for Palin, a fellow Republican, as their second choice, Palin would have won the election by more than 2,000 votes. But after a year of publicly trading insults, the blood between Begich and Palin was so bad that not only did 21,371 Republicans and independents who had voted for Begich refuse to vote for Palin as their second choice, but 7,477 of those voters voted for Peltola as their second choice.

Many of those Begich voters, as well as 1,031 voters who had voted for the Libertarian Bye as their first choice but who then had voted for Peltola as their second choice, did so because members of Don Young’s inner circle, who had no use for Begich and next to no use for Palin, advised Peltola, with whose policy views most Republican, Libertarian and center-right to hard-right independent voters were not familiar, to advertise herself during the run-up to the general election as the mukluk-wearing reincarnation of Don Young, even though she was a liberal Democrat and throughout his almost half-century tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives, Young had been a stalwart conservative Republican.

The outcomes of the 2022 Senate and House elections obfuscated the principal lesson that those elections have to teach regarding the ranked-choice voting election system. Which is that the ranked-choice voting system eliminates multiple-candidate general elections that historically have benefited Democratic candidates for statewide elective 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 Dick Randolph and Joe Vogler, the Libertarian Party and Alaska Independence Party candidates (both of whom were considerably more conservative than Fink), collectively won 32,302 votes. In a ranked choice voting election, most Randolph and Vogler voters would have voted for Fink as their second choice and Fink, rather than Sheffield, would have won the election.

Similarly, in the 1994 gubernatorial election, Democrat Tony Knowles defeated Republican Jim Campbell by only 683 votes in an election in which Jack Coghill and Ralph Winterrowd, the Alaska Independence Party and Patriot Party candidates (both of whom were considerably more conservative than Campbell), collectively won 29,581 votes, and Jim Sykes, the Green Party candidate who was considerably more liberal than Knowles, won 8,727 votes. In a ranked choice voting election, while most Sykes voters would have voted for Tony Knowles as their second choice, most Coghill and Winterrowd voters would have voted for Jim Campbell as their second choice — and Campbell, rather than Knowles, would have won the election.

Finally, in the 2008 Alaska Senate election, Democrat Mark Begich defeated Republican Ted Stevens by 3,953 votes in an election in which Bob Bird and Frederick Haase, the Alaska Independence Party and Libertarian Party candidates (both of whom were considerably more conservative than Stevens), collectively won 15,680 votes. In a ranked choice voting election, even though at the time he was a convicted felon, most Bird and Haase voters likely would have voted for Ted Stevens as their second choice. If they did, Stevens, rather than Begich, would have won the election.

What those what-if ranked-choice election outcomes demonstrate is that absent aberrant circumstances such as those that determined the outcomes of the 2022 Alaska Senate and House elections, in a state whose electorate skews center-right to hard-right and in which Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost two to one, the ranked choice voting system benefits Republican candidates for statewide elective office and disadvantages Democratic candidates.

Why the leaders of the Alaska Republican and Democratic parties all have reason for the opposite conclusion is a befuddlement that reconfirms the validity of the observation long ago of the Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Menken, that the “most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.”

Donald Craig Mitchell is an Anchorage attorney, 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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