Ranked Choice Voting Disaster

9 April 2024
Article category: Highlights. Tags: 

Ranked Choice Voting is an impediment to free and fair elections. It is being used as a tool by the left undermine the principle of "one person, one vote" and to permanently skew elections to the left.

The 9 April 2024 Washington Examiner article, The Left's latest scheme to permanently change elections in America, by Paul Teller and Jason Snead describes why this is the case. Excerpts are included below:

... left-wing activists are taking every opportunity to change elections permanently for partisan gain.

Their latest tactic is to undermine the basic principle of "one person, one vote" with a new scheme called ranked choice voting.

... liberal special interests are leading a sophisticated national campaign to push ranked choice voting in nearly every state. They have hired lobbyists, formed astroturf activist groups, and are financing state ballot measures across the country. This year alone, more than a half-dozen states, including battlegrounds such as Arizona and Nevada, are facing initiatives to change their elections with ranked choice voting.

Ranked choice voting's proponents cloak it in deliberately misleading messaging. Advocates say it "make[s] elections more fair and more democratic." Nothing could be further from the truth...

The most common form of ranked choice voting being pushed nationwide is called "Final Five Voting," and it is designed to upend elections in two fundamental ways. First, it replaces party primaries with California-style jungle primaries in which all candidates compete in a single contest. That means no more Republican and Democratic nominees and no guarantee that voters will have a choice between the two parties in November.

Then, for the general election, voters must rank up to five candidates in each ranked choice voting race. In federal election years, ballots typically feature a dozen or more major races. That means voters must wade through and carefully rank 60 or more candidates each election.

It only gets more complicated from there. If no candidate wins a majority of the vote, ranked choice voting manufactures one. Tabulators strike the candidate with the fewest first-place votes and redistribute his or her ballots to each voter's next-highest choice. These elimination rounds continue until someone (often the person who initially came in second or even third place) wins a majority of the remaining votes. Needless to say, the ranked choice voting process takes much longer to tabulate, leading to delayed results, recounts, and frustrated voters.

Only a few dozen localities and two of the smallest states, Maine and Alaska, use ranked choice voting... In 2022, for example, officials in Oakland, California, certified the wrong winner in a school board race... In Alaska, officials concealed full election results for 15 days...

... Oakland is now trying to junk this troublesome system, and Alaskans will have the chance to vote on a citizen-led ranked choice voting repeal this fall. Aspen, Colorado, repealed the system after just one election. And in Utah, half of the cities that signed up for a ranked choice voting pilot program have walked away.

Ranked choice voting... is actually the product of a concerted national campaign bankrolled by an elite group of liberal megadonors such as John Arnold and George Soros... all to peddle a voting scheme aimed at pushing politics to the Left.

... Our organizations are proud partners in a national coalition dedicated to stopping the spread of ranked choice voting... So far, five states have banned ranked choice voting...

Progressive elites are doubling down, aiming to lock as many states as possible into their partisan scheme before voters realize how flawed ranked choice voting really is...

Related

Learn more about Ranked Choice Voting - RCV

The Threat of Ranked Choice Voting

The problem with ranked-choice voting, by Thomas Buckley, American Thinker, 13 February 2023.

Republicans Must Stand Up to Ranked-Choice Voting, by Aaron Flanigan, AMAC, 27 October 2023.

Democrat Defeats Palin in Alaska: Rank Choice Voting and Mail-in Ballots, by Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit, 1 September 2022.