EDITORIAL: Should political parties or voters decide who represents Alaska?

A great deal of money and effort has been spent over the past several months to make the fight over Ballot Measure 2 seem more nuanced and complicated than it actually is. At its core, the choice in front of Alaska voters is a simple one: Do we want to return to a system where Alaska’s two main political parties (and their most radically partisan members) overwhelmingly controlled the choices Alaskans had in the general election? The measure would repeal the initiative passed by voters in 2020 and do away with ranked choice voting and open primaries. And it’s no accident that proponents of the measure have focused on RCV, the benefits of which are subtler and more gradual than open primaries. Because although Ballot Measure 2′s backers do want to repeal RCV, their real power grab is trying to put political parties back in control of selecting candidates by doing away with open primaries. Alaskans should reject that effort.

Open primaries were less a focus of the 2020 ballot measure that instituted RCV when it passed, but their benefit since has been obvious and substantial. Instead of selecting a slate of candidates for just one political party, voters now get to choose their favorite from among all those registered in each race, ensuring that the four who advance to the general election are the most popular choices.

By contrast, the old system rewarded the most extreme candidates who pandered to the basest instincts of their party faithful. The clearest example of this tendency was Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s defeat in the 2010 Republican primary by Fairbanks lawyer Joe Miller, whose extreme positions were hugely unpopular among Alaskans as a whole, but wildly popular with the slim fraction of Republicans who turned out to vote in August. As a result, Murkowski had to mount a historic write-in campaign to stave off an objectively bad candidate, just because she didn’t pass her own party’s ideological purity test.

Under the old system, Alaska paid for the closed partisan primaries with public money, but the political parties were the ones who benefited. Why would we want to return to that?

For its own part, ranked choice voting has also been a success at providing an incentive for lawmakers to focus more on getting work done than throwing out red meat to their political base. There will always be legislators who represent strongly partisan districts, so far-right Republicans and far-left Democrats are in no danger of disappearing from state politics — but in a substantial number of competitive races, RCV has made candidates recognize that their best chance of prevailing is appealing to at least some of their opponents’ voters, which means vilifying them isn’t a smart move. The result is pragmatic representation that doesn’t swing too far in one direction or turn up its nose when political opponents show willingness to work on bipartisan solutions. It also gives independent candidates and those of parties outside the R-D dichotomy a fairer shake, as there are four spots on the general election ballot for each race.

American politics these days are more fractious, divisive, mean and sometimes outright dangerous than we’ve seen in decades. We shouldn’t reward the extremists who grandstand and do everything they can to keep our system from working. We should encourage those who are interested in pitching in and working with one another — and that’s just what open primaries and RCV do. Slowly, Alaska is helping lead the rest of the U.S. back from the brink of extreme partisanship, and the party hacks who fundraise off of their members’ hatred for the “other side” are doing everything they can to take us back to the old, broken system.

Don’t let them. This election, cast a no vote on Ballot Measure 2 and keep political power in Alaska where it belongs — with the voters.