Alaska voters in 2020 adopted a new way to elect candidates, pairing an open primary with ranked choice voting in the general.
This election, Ballot Measure 2 asks voters whether they want to make history again by becoming the first state to ditch ranked choice voting and go back to partisan primaries.
The No on 2 campaign is trying to persuade Alaskans to keep what they have, equating the open primary, where all candidates appear on the same ballot, with freedom.
“We don't have to choose a ballot and limit our choices,” said Juli Lucky, who leads No on 2. “We can vote for anybody we want, and we can also vote for people from a different party. So if you'd like a Republican in one race, an independent in one race, a Democrat in another race, our open primary allows you to do that.”
Alaska’s system is lauded nationally as a way to end hyperpolarized politics and promote bipartisan compromise. And, largely from Outside sources, No on 2 has raised more than $12 million. It’s outspending Yes on 2 by 100 to 1.
Yet the ballot measure has a good chance of passing because the open primary and ranked choice is unpopular among Alaska conservatives.
Former Lt. Gov. Loren Leman, a Republican, argues that parties should be able to close their primary to voters of a different affiliation.
“Why should somebody who's registered as a Democrat vote in the Republican primary, to choose who their candidate is going to run against?” Leman asked, on a recent episode of “Alaska Insight”. “What do you think they're going to do? Going to low-ball somebody, or, you know, pick somebody that will be a weaker candidate.”
While opponents claim that the voting system was imposed on Alaska by Outside interests, Anchorage attorney Scott Kendall says he came up with the idea. He said he saw the need for it when he was chief of staff to Gov. Bill Walker, trying to get legislators to address the state’s fiscal crisis, among other issues. For two years, Kendall said, he couldn’t loosen legislators from their gridlock.
“They all feared being ‘primaried’ – you know, primary as a verb — that if they didn't toe the party line, they would get taken out,” he said. “We created a system that was designed for them to get reelected, but also designed for them to fail at their jobs.”
So in 2018, Kendall started thinking of a way to open the primary. He opted for a primary in which the top-four candidates advance to the general. And then he needed a way to narrow the field without creating the spoiler effect, where two candidates from the same party would split the vote and elect a competitor. That’s where ranked choice came in. Then Kendall said he started seeking money to mount a ballot measure campaign.
“Both inside the state, which we had a little bit of success (at), and then outside the state,” he said. “But the ideas and the writing of the measure was all done here in Alaska, by Alaskans.”
Alaska and Maine are the only states that have ranked choice voting for all or most state elections, though several cities use the method. In November, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon will vote on whether to employ ranked choice in future elections. Meanwhile, 10 Republican-led states ban ranked choice.
(If Ballot Measure 2 is approved, Alaska would be the first state to get rid of ranked choice voting for state elections. But North Carolina launched a ranked choice pilot program 16 years ago for local elections and thenlet it sunset. It also briefly allowed ranked choice voting to elect judges.)
For many Alaska conservatives, the problem with ranked choice voting was exemplified the first time it was deployed, in the special election for U.S. House in 2022. Democrat Mary Peltola got more of the first-choice ballots than Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III. But the two Republicans combined got more votes than the single Democrat.
In theory, ranked choice should have healed that Republican split. If every Begich voter ranked Sarah Palin second, Palin would have won.
But Begich voters chose not to use their ballots that way.
Instead, barely more than half of Begich voters chose Palin second. Nearly a third voted for Peltola second. And about a fifth of Begich voters did not rank a second candidate.
So Peltola won. Palin did not get enough of the Begich vote to overtake Peltola’s lead.
To avoid a repeat, some Republicans pressed the message that voters should “rank the red,” even if they don’t like the system. Still, a similar thing happened in the regular election in November 2022: Peltola got more first-choice ballots than the other candidates, and the 2nd and 3rd rankings didn’t give Palin enough of a boost to overtake Peltola’s lead.
The lesson many Republicans took from this is that it’s bad to have two Republican candidates on the general ballot and the idea of ranking as a means of avoiding a spoiler effect hasn’t caught on.
Leman said ranked choice isn’t a good tool for that.
“It's convoluted. It's complex. It's confusing to people,” he said.
Proponents of ranked choice say it’s so simple, even children get it. Lucky points to the low error rate on 2022 ballots as proof that the system isn’t difficult.
One person who has changed his view is Former U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat, who was a leading voice against ranked choice voting at first.
“Yeah, in 2020 I supported the effort to keep it the way it was, keep our primary, keep the general election, let the parties make the decision,” said Begich, uncle of House candidate Nick Begich III.
The former senator worried, among other things, that the new system might mean Democratic candidates would be shut out of the general election. Now, he said, he believes it encourages candidates to be less polarized, to campaign on who they are.
“I have changed my view, and I've seen it give voters much more choices. And I know there's an effort now to get rid of it. I don't think that's a good idea,” he said.
The repeal measure will appear on the ballot as Ballot Measure 2. A yes vote would do away with the open primary and ranked choice voting and replace them with party primaries and single-choice general elections. A no vote would keep the system that’s been in use since 2022.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include information that North Carolina briefly launched a ranked choice voting experiment.
