The Scourge of Ranked Choice Voting

Billionaire progressives bankrolled the ranked choice scam in Alaska and want to spread it throughout the country...

If New York City Mayor Eric Adams is forced to resign as Mayor in the wake of his federal indictment and the burgeoning scandals surrounding his corrupt administration, the next Mayor will be chosen in a snap general election in which there will be no partisan nominees. The ballot is certain to include numerous radical progressive Democrats including Attorney General Leticia James and Public Advocate Jumanne Williams.

More disturbing however is the fact that the City will use what is called a ‘ranked choice’ voting system to choose the next Mayor.

Ranked Choice voting is a scam and people need to understand it.

This scourge that is gaining momentum nationwide, is imperative to be on the radar of election integrity experts. When enacted in any given state, this scheme radically alters the standard voting procedure of an individual selecting one candidate for each position on a ballot. Under ranked choice, individuals instead assign a numerical rank to various candidates rather than voting for one preferred candidate.

In the ranked choice system recently set up in Alaska, a candidate can only win an election if they gain 50 percent plus one of all votes cast. During Alaska’s special election in 2022, three Congressional candidates appeared on the ballot – Democrat Mary Peltola, Republican Nick Begich III, and Republican Sarah Palin – in the state’s first ever test of ranked choice voting.

In this race, Peltola, the Democrat, received 39.7 percent of first preferences under ranked choice. Palin came in second with 30.9 percent and Begich in third with 27.8 percent. Even though the two Republicans received 57.8 percent of the first preference votes, Peltola somehow came out with 51.5 percent of the final vote, after “second choices” were factored in, over Palin’s 48.5 percent after Begich was eliminated.

How could this be? Well, the answer was that the voters of Alaska were sold a bill of goods about how ranked choice worked during the ballot initiative process. The new ranked choice system ended the primary voting system as it is typically conducted in states across the country. Instead of having Republican and Democrat primary elections, it is replaced with a supposedly ‘nonpartisan’ primary election with the top four candidates advancing to the general election.

With more candidates on the ballot, that prevents the political establishment from being truly challenged. Democrats can place their second ranking to whomever is the most moderate Republican, and the true conservative will always lose. This is what happened in 2022 midterms in Alaska when anti-Trump RINO Sen. Lisa Murkowski defeated anti-establishment upstart Kelly Tshibaka with the second choice picks from Democrats putting Murkowski over the top.

“I don’t want this to happen to any other electorate, in any city, in any state. Alaska is kind of this test case right now where we have elements of a perfect bad storm. We have lax voter-ID laws. We have a long election cycle where mail-in ballots can be mailed in for — gosh — it seems like months, if not many weeks,” Palin said about ranked choice voting.

“The ballot question that asked whether we wanted ranked choice voting, it was 26 pages long, the explanation,” she recalled. “That right there should have told people, ‘Hey, wait.’ Anything that you can’t explain concisely, it’s no good when it comes to government,” Palin added.

“It’s concerning to me that across Alaska the votes didn’t come in, across political parties they didn’t come in, across the socio-economy spectrum they didn’t come in,” said Kelly Tshibaka, who started “Preserve Democracy” to end ranked choice voting in Alaska after the 2022 midterms.

“I don’t think I would have started this had it just been a loss to Murkowski but not had such glaring data behind it that was really alarming. For me, it was the record low voter turnout, combined with all the voices I heard over two years,” Tshibaka continued.

Academics have admitted publicly that the effect of ranked-choice voting is to eliminate the voting power of passionate partisans. In Alaska, the first ballot becomes effectively meaningless, with an instant run-off occurring due to the extreme unlikeliness of one candidate achieving an over 50 percent threshold in the first round. The power ultimately rests in the hands of the squishy, milquetoast electorate whichever candidate is the “least bad”, rather than candidates who they passionately support.

 “In the past we just kind of said, ‘Who the candidates are is settled by a partisan primary,’ and then ‘What team am I on?’  and voted for that team,” said University of Alaska-Anchorage Associate Professor of Economics Kevin Berry to Alaska Public Media. “Now, we need to think really hard about who these candidates are. And even amongst the people we disagree with, who would at least be the best at answering my phone call?”

Due to widespread public outrage, a proposal to repeal ranked choice voting is on the ballot in Alaska in this year’s general election. Alaskan voters only approved ranked choice voting by a narrow 50.55% to 49.45% margin in Nov. 2020, roughly only 3,700 votes. Alaskans were barraged with misleading propaganda by progressive organizations that knew ranked choice voting would be their Trojan Horse to upend the MAGA revolution and any future populist uprising from challenging the socialist globalist status quo in Washington D.C.

Groups behind the ranked-choice voting scam include the Unite America PAC, a Colorado-based group that has received over $8 million in funding from Kathryn Murdoch, the liberal daughter-in-law of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch. They tout Alaska’s system as the model that they want to export throughout the country.

Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, describes Alaska’s establishment-protecting ranked choice system as their “North Star policy” because it has been designed by insiders to combine “a nonpartisan primary at the primary level — and that means there’s a single, unified primary with all candidates and all voters — and an instant runoff general election that uses a ranked choice ballot to find a majority winner.”

Another group that has given substantial funds to the ranked choice cause in Alaska is the Action Now Initiative. The Action Now Initiative was founded by former Enron executive John Arnold and his wife, Laura. Their organization has funded state-level efforts designed to promote Democrat supremacy across the country, gifting over $5 million in donations to the successful “Voters Not Politicians” campaign, which granted liberal special interests a monopoly on gerrymandering Congressional maps in Michigan. They have contributed many millions to various state-level green energy scam initiatives as well.

This multi-pronged elitist network hopes to export ranked-choice policies to states such as Montana, Colorado and South Dakota next. Groups like Unite America PAC and the Action Now Initiative are bankrolling the efforts to defeat Alaska’s Proposal 2. The “No on 2” campaign has raised close to $4.8 million, much of it from billionaires who live outside of the state. To contrast, the grassroots-driven “Yes on 2” campaign has raised $61,000, just 1.3% percent of what Alaska’s ranked choice lobby has raked in.

These outside groups funded by billionaires are taking an intent interest in the small state of Alaska. These progressive oligarchs see ranked choice voting as the scam that will allow them to take power in largely conservative jurisdictions under false pretenses. If these sinister forces are not able to blatantly stuff the ballot box with dubious mail-in votes or rig the vote-counting software, they will resort to schemes like ranked choice voting to tilt the tables in their favor.

The Uni-party establishment is willing to shamelessly create any gimmick to make the voting process less simple and less transparent, deliberately opening the door for more corruption and subterfuge. This is why they have created a ranked choice-industrial complex that is pushing these so-called reforms in the most disingenuous of ways. The folly of Alaska’s ranked-choice system is a case study in why states should never cede control over their electoral process to outsiders, and patriots need to be vigilant of this scourge before the push inevitably begins in their states.