Alaska Republicans Peeved About Palin Loss Take Aim at State’s Ranked-Choice Voting

The Alaska Supreme Court is set to hear arguments Thursday in a case concerning whether a measure aimed at repealing the state’s ranked-choice voting system, which Republicans blame for their loss of the state’s congressional seat, will appear on ballots in November.In 2020, Alaska voters voted to implement ranked-choice voting, a system that requires the winning candidate to receive a majority of the vote to win. At the time, it appeared that the measure was aimed at helping Senator Murkowski retain her Senate seat. Although she is broadly popular in the state, she is unpopular among Alaska Republicans and would likely not win the GOP primary there.The system works by allowing voters to rank their preferred candidates. When tallying votes, the candidate with the least support is eliminated and their votes are reapportioned to the voter’s next choice. This process is repeated until there is a candidate with majority support.The measure approved by Alaskans also replaced the state’s party-controlled closed primary with an open primary system. The four most popular candidates from the state’s open primary proceed to the general election.Republicans blame ranked choice voting for their 2022 loss in Alaska, which saw Congresswoman Mary Peltola defeat Governor Palin in the race for the state’s House seat, 51 percent to 49 percent in the final tally. The other Republican candidate, Nick Begich, was eliminated in the first round and a fourth Democratic candidate dropped out before election day.Now, a group of voters represented by the former Alaska attorney general, Kevin Clarkson, are supporting a ballot measure aimed at repealing the state’s voting system and reinstituting a plurality voting system.The state supreme court will hear a challenge to this ballot measure brought by a group of Anchorage voters on Thursday, who are being assisted by the group Alaskans for Better Elections.The challenge rests on a few claims, including that petitioners left signature books unattended in violation of state law and that 15 petition books were notarized by someone who was not a notary at the time.The group also claims that the elections division allowed petitioners to fix their signatures after submission in violation of state law and that fixes to these signatures happened after the deadline to submit petitions.In their arguments, the attorneys seeking to challenge the ballot measure reference a 1986 Alaska Supreme Court decision in which a candidate was disqualified for filing ten minutes after the deadline.“The legal principle is well-established, both in Alaska and in other jurisdictions, that election law filing deadlines are to be strictly enforced,”the state supreme court ruled at the time.However, the challenge has so far lost at lower courts, with a judge at Anchorage Superior Court ruling in favor of allowing the repeal measure to appear on ballots, citing a 2006 state Supreme Court decision.“The right to initiative is a key feature of Alaska’s governance. Our Supreme Court has reiterated on several occasions that the right to initiative is not to be defeated by technical rule violations,” the 2006 decision reads.An attorney representing the voters who are seeking to repeal ranked-choice voting, Mr. Clarkson, tells the Sun that he thinks his opponents are trying to disqualify the ballot measure based on technicalities and that they have an uphill battle to disqualify the measure.“In elections cases they strictly construe the rules,” Mr. Clarkson says. “In an initiatives case, it’s different.”While Mr. Clarkson is defending the measure to repeal in court, he rejected the notion put forth by some Republicans that the voting system cost them the state’s House seat in 2022, a narrative driving the push to repeal the voting system.“The way that election played out just really ticked off conservatives,” Mr. Clarkson says. “Palin supporters and Begich supporters just hated the candidate on the other side and they would rank the other candidate.”In the wake of the Republicans’ loss, national figures like Senator Cotton said that “Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections.” A Republican National Committee spokeswoman, Emma Vaughn, even claimed at the time that “ranked-choice voting disenfranchises voters.”What national Republicans did not acknowledge at the time, however, is that a Republican likely would have won if supporters of Mr. Begich or Ms. Palin were willing to name the other Republican as their second choice candidate, an issue which ended up being decisive in the election.“I don’t know if it was so much that ranked-choice voting was favoring liberals, it’s just the way it played out,” Mr. Clarkson says of the 2022 election. “It seems to be the party out of power who benefits from ranked-choice voting.”Ms. Peltola also ran a successful campaign that year focused on fishing regulation in Alaska and has frequently voted against her party on issues like border security and foreign aid.The push in Alaska is part of a larger movement by Republicans across the country to ban or repeal the majoritarian voting system. Ranked-choice voting specifically has been banned in Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho.Some Democratic incumbents at Washington D.C., the most Democratic jurisdiction in the country, have also come out against ranked-choice voting, including Mayor Muriel Bowser.An attorney for the group seeking to disqualify the ballot measure did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Alaska Republicans Peeved About Palin Loss Take Aim at State’s Ranked-Choice Voting

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