Alaska was the second state to adopt ranked-choice voting in federal and statewide elections, but it may be the first to abandon it.
A citizen’s initiative ballot measure that would repeal the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system made it to the November ballot after legal challenges. As a result, Alaskans will be asked in Ballot Measure 2 to decide if they would like to repeal or keep the state’s open primary and top-four voting system.
If the repeal is successful, Alaska would revert to primaries that are controlled by the political parties and general elections where voters pick only their top candidate.
The repeal effort centers its argument around the ranked-choice aspect of the state’s voting system, while supporters of the system have dug in to fight for open primaries.
The 2020 ballot measure to institute ranked choice-voting succeeded with 51% of the vote. Efforts to roll it back ramped up after the system’s debut in the 2022 election.
The 2022 results showed the range of possibilities in statewide elections under the election system: conservative Republican Mike Dunleavy was reelected governor, moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski was reelected as a U.S. senator, and Democrat Mary Peltola was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Alaska’s open primary means that every voter is eligible to vote for any candidate, regardless of political affiliation, in the primary election. The top four vote-getters move on to the general election.
The general election is decided by ranked-choice voting, which means that voters get to rank the four candidates in order of preference. If one candidate gets more than 50% of the votes, they win. If the votes are more evenly split, the candidate with the least first-preference votes is eliminated. Voters who selected the eliminated candidate as their first choice now have their second choice counted, so their vote still counts even if their preferred candidate is eliminated. If the vote redistribution results in a majority, that decides the election. If not, the third-place candidate is eliminated.
“I believe that there was a large percentage of the people, not just in Alaska, but anywhere that ranked-choice voting is being implemented, that don’t understand ranked choice voting, and it complicates their voting so much to the point where they just stop voting,” said Phillip Izon II, the man behind the initiative to repeal the voting system.
He pointed to a low general election turnout in 2022 — the lowest in decades.
Prominent Republicans have backed Ballot Measure 2. Former Gov. Sarah Palin, who lost to Peltola in 2022, supports the repeal initiative.
But the repeal opposition campaign, called No on 2, is chaired by a Republican, former state Sen. Lesil McGuire. The group has collected millions in donations from national nonpartisan organizations.
State elections officials estimate it would cost $2.5 million to repeal ranked-choice voting.
But Juli Lucky, campaign manager for No on 2, said there are other costs to an Alaska without open primaries and ranked-choice voting, that come in the form of political gridlock. She argues that before open primaries and ranked voting, the state’s Legislature was more polarized, and that was expensive.
“The Legislature was not getting organized on time. There was a lot of partisan fighting. We were seeing delays of about 30 days where the Legislature wasn’t actually getting to work, and then we saw a lot of special sessions where there was a lot of arguments and not a lot of solving problems,” she said.
The Legislature called four special sessions in 2021, the year before open primaries and ranked-choice voting, costing nearly $2 million.
For the past two decades, Alaska’s primary has been partially closed. The Republican Party limited its primary to registered Republicans and those without a party, while excluding Democrats and third-party voters. The other parties, including the Democratic, Libertarian and Alaskan Independence parties, have shared a primary ballot.
In 2022, with the advent of open primaries, there was only one ballot and all the candidates in each race were on it.
Advocates of the open primary say that it benefits the majority of Alaskans because most are not registered with a major political party and do not vote a “straight ticket” — they vote for candidates from multiple political parties in different races. For example, a voter might choose a Republican to represent them as state senator, but a Democrat to represent them in the state House.
“Right now, we have a system where every Alaskan can vote for any candidate at every election, regardless of the party,” Lucky said. “What’s at stake is taking power away from voters to choose the candidate they like at every election.”
But what looks like a benefit to Lucky, is considered a flaw by those who would like to see the end of the open primary.
Michael Tavoliero, a contributor to conservative Alaska news site Must Read Alaska, wrote in an August post that open primaries and ranked-choice voting “blur the lines between political parties … and erode both party integrity and conservative values.”
The multiplicity of choice that open primary proponents value is, in his view, a threat to party ideology.
Scott Kendall, an Alaska attorney who helped write the citizen’s initiative that led to open primaries and opposes its repeal, countered that diluting the influence of the parties may be more consistent with representing the will of the majority of Alaska’s electorate that are not affiliated with either major political party.
“We would be going back to a system where over 80% of the races are decided in the (party) primary by a much more partisan, much smaller group of voters. And I think that’s a huge loss,” Kendall said of the repeal campaign.
The Alaska Beacon is an independent, donor-funded news organization. Alaskabeacon.com.
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