Sarah Palin’s special election for Alaska’s lone House member delivered Democrats a victory last week, when former representative Mary Peltola trounced former Republican Governor and Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin and surprised political observers with a surprising result.
“Ranked Choice Voting: 60% of voters cast ballots for Republicans. A Democrat won,” Jack Posobeic noted the unexpected results of Alaska’s special election.
The process of “ranked choice voting” was what determined the outcomes. Because voters rank candidates from best to worst rather than selecting one specific candidate to support, ranked choice voting is regarded as being particularly progressive. In 2020, Alaskan voters narrowly approved the system.
The system is “all about political power, not about what is best for the American people and for preserving our great republic,” according to election experts Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams, and it undoubtedly aided the radical far left in its first effort in the state.
“In many cases under the ranked choice voting system, no one candidate is chosen as the top selection by a majority of voters in the first round. In this case, the candidate who received the lowest amount of votes is eliminated, and the voters who chose that candidate as their top choice are automatically counted as placing their second choice as their top choice,” according to the Daily Signal.
According to Daily Signal, “if a voter only ranks two out of five candidates on their ballot and those two candidates do not make it to the final round, there’s no third candidate choice to count as these voters’ top choice.” This is because many voters may simply not have their voices heard in an election under a ranked choice voting system. The rounds are continuously counted until a “winner” is determined, therefore these votes are simply ignored.
The following states provide ranked-choice voting:
Ranked Choice Voting States #RCV pic.twitter.com/yWrRaVy9GM
— Steven Carr #UltraMAGA #AmericaFirst🇺🇸 (@realStevenCarr) September 6, 2022
2018 saw the system’s adoption in Maine. Later that year, an NPR article declared that Democratic candidate Jared Golden had defeated Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin to win Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.
Despite being behind Poliquin in the initial count of votes, he won. According to Maine’s newly implemented method, nearly 9,000 ballots were not counted in the state’s election, according to Pew.
For a Republican, US Senator Tom Cotton (R–AK) does not like the voting process:
Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections.
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) September 1, 2022
And he faced backlash from a progressive who thinks our country is a democracy:
I've reported this tweet for violating Twitter rules about spreading false information about elections. RCV is not a scam, it's a decision rule for elections. It's just as valid and democratic as the majority rule election that elected you. Stop undermining faith in democracy.
— Jennifer N. Victor (@jennifernvictor) September 1, 2022
“The other ballots didn’t count in the final tally because they did not include rankings for the top two candidates, Adam Cote and Janet Mills. That translates to more than 6 percent of original ballots.” according to the source.
One Twitter user stated, “Rank choice voting is one of the most idiotic things we as a democracy have ever attempted with.
Yet liberals adore it:
And a final word in support of Ranked Choice Voting. I’m very proud of Alaska for having taken this interesting and innovative step towards making our elections better. As a pollster, I think it’s very cool!
FIN
PS. Thanks for the likes and retweets!
— Alaska Survey Research 🇺🇦 (@IvanMoore1) August 27, 2022
In Nevada, a referendum on the system’s adoption will be on the ballot in November. Safeguard Your Vote The ranked choice system, according to Nevada, “resulted in up to five times as many ballots being thrown out because of errors” in other states.
More on this story via The Republic Brief:
Spakovsky pointed out that under a ranked choice voting system, Australia’s liberal Labor Party won in 2010 against the center-right Liberal-National coalition, despite the latter receiving a higher percentage of votes than the former. (RELATED: Zuckerberg Will Not Make Election Donations For Midterms After 2020 Backlash)
“In other words, more voters wanted a center-right government than a left-wing government, but ranked choice made sure that did not happen,” Spakovsky wrote in the report. CONTINUE READING…