Alaska Conservatives Fight to End the Ranked-Choice Voting Scheme That Kept Murkowski From Being Primaried Out, and Resulted in a Democrat Winning the House Race

Time to un-rig their elections.

The ranked-choice voting system gives people multiple votes. If a hard leftwing Democrat can't get his first pick of a hard leftwing Democrat, he then gets to vote for his second choice-- like a Fake Republican or a RINO.

Thus, his vote counts multiple times -- which is how a strong conservative state like Alaska elects a leftleaning RINO, Lisa Murkowski, and a Democrat to the House.

If Democrat voters' first preferences -- Democrat candidates -- don't win, Democrat voters then got, essentially, the chance to vote again. They couldn't get a Democrat senator to win, but they could stop a conservative senator from winning.

In the congressional race, they straight-up got a Democrat elected, because some Republicans defected. Instead of voting for Sarah Palin in the second-choice votes, Republicans who supported the other Republican candidate instead chose a Democrat.

This system would result in Republicans getting second-chance votes in leftwing states like California -- and Republicans would then elect moderate Democrats on their second-chance votes, and even sometimes get a Republican elected in a Democrat district.

This is why the left has not pushed to implement this system in leftwing states.

Just us. We're the ones who aren't allowed to elect our preferred candidates. They can continue electing the most leftwing possible congressmen from leftwing states.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, out-of-state dark money poured into Alaska to hijack the state's elections by tricking voters into implementing a ranked-choice voting system. Now, following a midterm election fraught with record-low turnout and confused voters, Alaska's conservatives are fighting to take back control of their state's electoral process.

Known as Alaskans for Honest Elections, the grassroots organization is leading a statewide signature-collecting effort to put an initiative on the 2024 ballot to repeal Alaska's ranked-choice voting (RCV) system, which voters narrowly adopted in 2020. Last month, Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom certified the group's application for a petition to repeal RCV, meaning the organization may now begin collecting signatures from voters across the state. The group must get nearly 27,000 valid signatures in order for the initiative to appear on the ballot for the 2024 contest.

"We've put together over 5,000 volunteers who will be gathering [signatures] all over the state," Art Mathias, who's helping spearhead the signature drive, told The Federalist. "We're going to be at several outdoor shows, boating shows." We have volunteers who will "go to their friends, to their churches, to the shopping malls. Wherever people come through, [they'll] collect signatures."

Under RCV, which critics call "rigged-choice voting," voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter's second-choice candidate. Such a process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.

With RCV also comes the potential issue of ballot exhaustion, which occurs when a ballot is cast "but does not count toward the end election result." This can occur when voters fail to rank all the candidates on the ballot, leading to the disenfranchisement of voters (as some studies have shown).

While the 2020 RCV initiative, known as Ballot Measure 2, was sold to Alaskans as an effort to keep outside dark money from influencing the state's elections, it was out-of-state funding that helped push the initiative over the finish line. According to an October 2020 report by Breitbart News, for instance, Yes on 2 for Better Elections, a pro-RCV group, raised more funds from outside Alaska ($6,194,081) than from within the state ($20,000).

RCV "becomes an invitation for exceeding amounts of dark money to come in and put forth a candidate that nobody knows," Mathias said. "Alaskans are tired of being manipulated by rich people from outside [the state who] think they can tell us what to do."

During the 2022 midterms, Democrat Mary Peltola defeated former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in the race for Alaska's at-large congressional district as a result of ranked-choice voting. The RCV system also made a difference in the state's Senate race, where incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski fended off a challenge from Trump-backed Kelly Tshibaka. As The Federalist's Tristan Justice reported, Murkowski's allies were heavily involved in the push for Alaska to adopt RCV as a way to bolster the incumbent senator's reelection prospects.

Both Palin and Tshibaka have since come out in support of repealing RCV in Alaska, with Tshibaka recently forming Preserve Democracy, a nonprofit group dedicated to "fighting the spread of Ranked Choice Voting and increasing voter turnout."

I don't know how conservatives let themselves get fooled like this.

A big part of it is due to our corrupt, treacherous "leadership," which is actually on the left on most issues and wants the power of the conservative voter diluted.

posted by Ace at 03:06 PM

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