What Alaska voters should know as they consider repealing open primaries and ranked choice voting

Alaska was the second state to adopt ranked-choice voting in federal and state elections, but it may be the first to abandon it.

A citizen initiative ballot measure that would repeal the state’s open primary and ranked choice voting system made it onto the November ballot after legal challenges. As a result, Alaskans will be asked in Ballot Measure 2 to decide whether they would like to repeal or maintain the state’s open primary and top-four voting system.

If the repeal is successful, Alaska will return to political party-controlled primaries and general elections where voters choose just one candidate.

The recall effort centers its argument around the ranked choice aspect of the state’s voting system, while proponents of the system strive to fight for the open primary aspect.

The 2020 ballot measure to institute ranked choice voting was successful with 51% of the vote. But efforts to reverse it increased after the system debuted in the 2022 elections.

The 2022 results showed the range of possibilities in state elections under the electoral system: Conservative Republican Mike Dunleavy was re-elected governor, moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski was re-elected U.S. Senator, and Democrat Mary Peltola was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives .

How Open and Ranked Choice Primary Elections Work in Alaska

Alaska’s open primaries mean that every voter is eligible to vote for any candidate, regardless of political affiliation, in the primary election. The top four voters advance to the general election.

General elections are decided by ranked-choice voting, meaning voters rank the four candidates in order of preference. If a candidate receives more than 50% of the votes, he wins. If the votes are split more evenly, the candidate with the fewest first preference votes will be 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 redistribution of votes results in a majority, that decides the election. Otherwise, the third-placed team will be eliminated.

Are you a partisan?

Phillip Izon II, the man behind the citizens’ initiative effort to repeal open primary voting and ranked-choice voting, said the effort is about finding the fairest voting system possible, not its partisan implications.

“The main purpose was not because I was a member of the party, or was associated with the Republican Party, or anything like that,” he said. “It was primarily because I believe there was a large percentage of people, not just in Alaska, but anywhere where ranked choice voting is being implemented, who don’t understand ranked choice voting, and that greatly complicates their voting for the point where they just stop voting.”

He pointed to low turnout in the 2022 general election – the lowest in decades.

However, prominent Republicans supported Ballot Measure 2. Former governor Sara Palin, still reeling from the loss of the state’s only House seat, was the first to sign the recall effort’s petition, the Anchorage Daily News reported at the time . And some Republicans have pledged to withdraw from races this election cycle if they were not among the top vote-getters in the primaries, in an effort to bypass the ranked-choice system.

But the opposition repeal campaign, No on 2, is chaired by former state Sen. Lesil McGuire, a Republican from Anchorage, and has raised millions in donations from national nonpartisan organizations.

Open primaries and ranked choice have benefited both Republican and Democratic candidates. Notably, Democrat Mary Peltola was elected to the state’s only seat in the House of Congress after it had been held by Republican Don Young for nearly half a century. Republican Reps. Julie Coulombe and Tom McKay, both members of the House Republican majority caucus and who support repeal, were elected after falling short among voters’ first preferences in the ranked-choice system.

How much does it cost

State election officials estimate it would cost $2.5 million to repeal ranked-choice voting. That comes after the price tag for instituting them, which was $3.5 million in a June estimate from state officials.

But Juli Lucky, campaign manager for No on 2, said there are other costs to an Alaska without open primaries and ranked-choice voting, which come in the form of political gridlock. She argues that before open primaries and ranked-choice voting, the state Legislature was more polarized, and that was costly.

“The Legislature was not organizing itself in time. There was a lot of partisan fighting. We were seeing delays of about 30 days where the Legislature wasn’t actually working, and then we saw a lot of special sessions where there was a lot of arguments and little problem solving,” she said.

The Legislature called four special sessions in 2021, a year before open primaries and ranked-choice voting, costing nearly $2 million.

Open primaries

For the past two decades, Alaska’s primaries have been partially closed. The Republican Party limited its primaries to registered Republicans and those with no party, while excluding Democrats and third-party voters. The other parties, including the Democratic, Libertarian and Alaska Independence parties, shared the primary vote.

In 2022, with the advent of open primaries, there was only one vote and all candidates from each contest participated. Proponents of open primaries say it benefits most 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 across different races. For example, a voter might choose a Republican to represent them as a state senator, but a Democrat to represent them in the state House.

Lucky said ending open primaries would give more power to political parties than individual Alaskans because parties can choose to end their primaries.

“Right now, we have a system where all Alaskans can vote for any candidate in every election, regardless of party,” Lucky said. “What is at stake is taking away from voters the power to choose the candidate they like in each election. And I think that’s extremely important because in the past, what we’ve seen is that a lot of races were decided in those primaries with lower turnout, which in the recent past were closed primaries, where voters didn’t have the ability to look at all the candidates and choose among all candidates.”

But what seems like a benefit to Lucky is considered a flaw by those who would like to see an end to open primaries.

Michael Tavoliero, a contributor to the conservative Alaskan news site Must Read Alaska, wrote in an August post that open primaries and ranked-choice voting “blur the lines between political parties, allowing non-Republicans to influence the outcome of elections.” Republican primaries and erode the integrity of both parties. and conservative values.”

Thus, the multiplicity of choices that proponents of open primaries value is, in their opinion, a threat to the party’s ideology.

“In a closed primary, only registered Republicans would have a say in choosing their candidate, ensuring that the nominee aligns closely with the party’s ideology,” he wrote. “Open primaries, on the other hand, can lead to the nomination of candidates who appeal to a broader, less ideologically consistent electorate, potentially weakening the party’s position on key issues like small government and personal freedom.”

Scott Kendall, an Alaska lawyer who helped write the citizen initiative that led to the open primary and opposes the recall, responded that diluting the parties’ influence may be more consistent with representing the will of the majority of Alaska’s electorate that is not affiliated with any of them. main political party.

Regarding repeal, he said: “We would be returning to a system where more than 80% of races are decided in primaries by a much smaller, much more partisan group of voters. And I think it’s a great loss.”

While Izon’s focus is on ranked-choice voting, he said open primaries are worth repealing because they are susceptible to manipulation.

“Anyone can fund a candidate to go to the polls and be in the top four, and then tell them to drop out,” he said, adding that the idea should scare people of any political party. He pointed to the case of Eric Hafner, the jailed out-of-state Democrat who is on the U.S. House ballot after a legal challenge failed. “There is a considerable portion of the population that doesn’t even know that Eric Hafner is in prison,” Izon said.

He said there are several examples of candidates screwing up in this year’s elections, so he would rather political parties scrutinize candidates than deal with it.

“Would you rather vote straight or have a felon on your ballot in a general (election)?” he asked. “Personally, I prefer to vote for a straight ticket.”

Ranked Choice Voting

The main argument of many opponents of ranked-choice voting is that the ranking of candidates is too confusing for voters. Izon said he believes confusion is behind low turnout in Alaska’s 2022 general election. He said it was his grandfather’s bewilderment when faced with a ranked vote that forced him to initiate the recall in the first place.

Lucky responded that there were several factors that made voting confusing in 2022 that had nothing to do with candidate rankings. She pointed to a redistricting effort that has rocked the Legislature.

“All but one senator had enough changes in their district that their seats were up for election or were on a schedule where their seats were up for election,” she said.

Additionally, she said, there was a special election to fill Don Young’s congressional seat after his death, followed closely by that year’s primary election.

However, she said, 99.8% of ballots in the 2022 general election were completed correctly and more than 70% of voters rated the candidates. She said these results show that voters understand the electoral system.

Izon reflected that by fighting one confusing change, he may be precipitating another. But he said he is determined to find the fairest voting system.

“Every time we make a change, we are hurting someone, and that is the problem. What is the fairest system at the moment? I think the fairest system is the one that everyone understands,” he said.

If the search for the fairest system unites opposing sides of the recall effort, then its response divides them.

Claire Stremple is a Juneau-based reporter who started in public radio at KHNS in Haines, then in health and environment at KTOO in Juneau. This article originally appeared online at alaskabeacon.com. Alaska Beacon, an affiliate of States Newsroom, is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans with state government.