Ballot Measure 2, the effort to repeal Alaska’s ranked choice voting and open primaries, was winning slightly as election results continued to come in early Wednesday, with about 97% of Alaska precincts counted.
Wednesday results showed Ballot Measure 2 ahead by 4,289 votes, out of a total of more than 256,000 ballots cast. That's a margin of less than 2 percentage points.
The other initiative on Alaska voters’ ballots, to increase the state’s minimum wage, appeared headed to victory, with a margin of 13 percentage points.
Loren Leman, a former Republican lieutenant governor who worked with the campaign to repeal ranked choice voting and open primaries, pointed to the Ballot Measure 2 campaign being outspent 100-to-1.
“I think just the very fact that the numbers are that close, even after they spent all the money, says that Alaskans don’t really want the complexities of ranked choice voting, and it’s confusing to a lot of people and it’s unnecessary,” Leman said.
Anchorage attorney Scott Kendall, an architect of the 2020 ranked choice voting law and an opponent of 2024's Ballot Measure 2, said he was feeling positive as results showed the margin between "yes" and "no" votes narrowing late Tuesday.
“We knew this would be a tight race," Kendall said. "However, when it comes to outstanding votes, it’s like real estate: location, location, location. It’s noteworthy that in our strongest core of support in rural Alaska, very few votes are in.”
Alaskans had narrowly adopted the voting method in 2020. It was first deployed in 2022, in a special election for U.S. House that Democrat Mary Peltola won.
The system’s fans say it encourages bipartisanship and gives candidates an incentive to appeal to a broader swath of the electorate.
But opponents, especially conservatives and the state’s Republican Party, never liked it.
Jeff Fenske, who was waving campaign signs in Midtown Anchorage before polls closed, said he didn’t trust the tabulation process and he really resented that the opponents of repeal were able to raise so much money from out of state to keep ranked choice voting.
“It doesn't help the conservative cause at all,” Fenske said. “You know, they just made up a bunch of stuff, and they have so much money for those ads that they were able to manipulate people's opinion.”
The new system did away with partisan primaries. Instead, candidates of any party and stripe appeared on the same August ballot. The top four finishers — or more, in the case of presidential elections — advanced to the November ballot.
In the general election, ranking gave voters the opportunity to participate in an “instant runoff.” Voters could choose their favorite and also rank the remaining candidates to indicate where they’d like their ballot to go if their No. 1 choice was eliminated.
Toby Ovod-Everett of Anchorage waved on “No on 2” at rush-hour traffic. He said the open primary and ranked choice voting produces “less bickering and more governing.”
“I'd like to see more centrist candidates, candidates that I would agree with less, but that I could feel like were maybe beginning to combat this hyper-partisanship that is taking over the country,” Ovod-Everett said.
No on 2 ran a $14 million campaign, pitching the issue as one of “voter freedom” — meaning the freedom to vote a ballot that includes all the primary candidates, regardless of party. Some of their ads suggested veterans would be “forced to join a political party in order to vote for the candidate we want.”
Before the 2020 election reforms, the Republican party limited access to its ballot but still allowed unaffiliated voters to vote in its primary. Leman called the No on 2 claims misleading, because no one was forced to join the Republican party to vote in the GOP primary.
“It was an open primary, or you can say a semi-open: It was open to all voters, 80% of the voters of Alaska, except for those who chose to be registered to another party,” he said.
The Yes on 2 campaign raised barely more than $150,000.
Thousands of ballots remain to be counted over the next 15 days, but if Ballot Measure 2 passes, parties would regain the right to close their primaries to the extent they choose.
If voters do end up approving Ballot Measure 1, the state’s minimum wage would increase in steps, to $13 an hour in 2025, $14 in 2026 and $15 in 2027. The initiative would also require that the state’s minimum wage is set at least $2 more than the federal minimum wage and require paid sick leave for many employees.
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