"Democrat Mary Peltola’s scheme to dupe voters in the Senate race vindicates critics of ranked-choice voting."
The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
They long ago declared war on election integrity and applaud Mary Peltola for duping the voters. Even if she loses they will ignore the lesson that Alaska teaches us about RCV.
"If you look at the history of Alaska’s elections since it was admitted to the Union in 1959, it becomes obvious that it is not a “blue” state. The last time Alaska’s voters cast their ballots for a Democrat in a presidential election was 1964, and they haven’t elected a Democratic Senator since 2008. Likewise, only three Democrats have won Alaska’s at-large House seat in the last 67 years. This is to be expected considering that Democrats constitute only 12 percent of the state’s electorate. Still, in 2020, they managed to dupe the voters into scrapping their traditional election process and replacing it with an “improved” system that would somehow reform campaign financing — Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV).
"If the Democrats had any genuine interest in honest elections, they would have avoided RCV like the plague. It is a system that is quite deliberately designed to disfranchise as many voters as possible while creating chaos and confusion among election officials. This was clearly illustrated by the results of Alaska’s first full scale experiment with it during the 2022 midterms: A state where Democrats are a tiny minority and which President Trump won by double digits in all three of his White House runs somehow elected Democrat Mary Peltola to its at-large seat in the House. Peltola was kicked out by the voters after only one full term, but RCV may allow her to seize the U.S. Senate seat currently held by GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan.
"This seems implausible until one grasps how RCV works: Voters rank candidates in a given race according to preference. If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the votes cast on the first ballot, a series of elimination rounds redistributes the votes until one candidate finally reaches a majority. If some voters have marked their ballots for only a single candidate, and that candidate fails to reach the final round, their ballots are thrown away. This quite literally disfranchises those voters because their ballots are not counted in the final tally. In 2022, Mary Peltola finally crossed the 50 percent line 16 days after Election Day. This is not what Alaskans thought they had voted for in 2020. As Kimberly Strassel wrote at the time in the Wall Street Journal
:Two years ago, left-leaning outside groups quietly funded Alaska liberals (posing under the vanilla title Alaskans for Better Elections) backing a ballot initiative to do away with the state’s perfectly good election system. It was replaced with a “top four” primary and a ranked-choice general election. Most Alaskans didn’t know what they were voting for, since the initiative was a mind-numbing 25 pages of single type, and its boosters tucked the voting part into the garble. The initiative instead led with a provision claiming it would eliminate “dark money.” . . .
. . . ""The spread of RCV will … multiply opportunities for fraud and induce Americans to vote for candidates they would not support under ordinary circumstances." More.
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