It’s time to end the failed experiment with ranked choice voting

(Alaska Division of Elections)

By Donald Craig Mitchell

In the 2020 general election, by less than 3,800 votes out of 344,000 cast, Alaska voters passed Ballot Measure 2, which replaced political party primary elections with ranked choice voting.

Prior to the election Anchorage attorney Scott Kendall, a former senior member of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s campaign staff who wrote Ballot Measure 2, touted ranked choice voting as the remedy for a primary election system he said was “broken,” among other reasons, because if a political party allows independent voters to participate in the party’s primary election they have to pick among candidates all of whom are members of the party.

But so what? Why should a political party allow independent voters who do not want to be a member of the party to participate in the party’s selection of its candidates to begin with?

What Kendall did not mention was that he had served as chief of staff for Gov. Bill Walker, who in 2014 had been elected as an independent candidate. So Kendall knew as well as anyone that the political party primary election system did not prevent independent voters from voting for, and electing, independent candidates.

What Kendall also knew even better than anyone was that the intended principal beneficiary of Ballot Measure 2 was Lisa Murkowski. In 2022 when Lisa ran for reelection, thanks to ranked choice voting, she did not have to compete against Kelly Tshibaka, Donald Trump’s revenge candidate, in a Republican primary election she undoubtedly would have lost.

Because, for reasons serendipitous, in 2022 in the first ranked choice voting election Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III to win Alaska’s seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, leaders of both the Alaska Democratic Party and the Alaska Republican Party concluded that ranked choice voting benefits Democratic candidates and disadvantages Republican candidates, even though the opposite is true because ranked choice voting eliminates multi-candidate general elections like those that enabled Democrats Bill Sheffield and Tony Knowles to win election as governor in 1982 and 1994, and enabled Independent Bill Walker to win in 2014.

In 2024 Republicans collected the signatures required to put repeal of ranked choice voting on the general election ballot. But repeal lost by 737 votes out of 321,000 cast. Having come that close, in 2026 they are trying again with a new Ballot Measure 2 whose principal sponsor is Bernadette Wilson, who finished first among the 12 Republican candidates who competed in the recent ranked choice gubernatorial primary election.

Conversely, a month before the election when Tom Begich, who polls suggested was the leading Democratic gubernatorial candidate, was asked whether he supported Ballot Measure 2 he answered: “I think ranked choice works for the state. It’s made us work better together. It’s helped build these bipartisan coalitions that instead of screaming at each other, we’re focused on actually achieving policy. Those are things that matter for the State of Alaska and those are things I believe in. That’s why I’ll be voting no on that ballot initiative.”

But10 days after he finished second behind Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins in an election he had assumed he would win, Begich quit and endorsed Kreiss-Tomkins. When asked why he had Begich explained that “It was a better chance of (a Democrat) winning if one of us went on alone. There’s just a limited pool (of money in the guise of campaign contributions). Being able to get enough resources to run a successful campaign is hard when you’re No. 2, not No. 1, in the outcome in a primary.”

Begich has continued to say that he remains a “vote no on 2 person.” And he has attributed the fact that during the primary election he and Kreiss-Tomkins did not criticize each other to the “direct impact of ranked choice voting.” Since Begich and Kreiss-Tomkins are center-left Democrats who served together in the Legislature and whose platforms were similar, that spin stretches credulity past breaking.

Tom Begich’s do as I say not as I did hypocrisy is entertaining, but, regrettably, no surprise.

It also merits comment that if Alaska had still had political party primary elections Kreiss-Tomkins would have won the Democratic primary, after which Begich and the Democratic voters who had supported his candidacy would have rotely joined the Kreiss-Tomkins campaign. And had there been a Republican primary, rather than twelve candidates there likely would have been two or three. And since Bernadette Wilson is a leader of the right-of-far-right MAGA faction inside the Alaska Republican Party, she likely would not have won the Republican gubernatorial nomination since in the ranked choice voting primary election the 11 other Republican candidates collectively won 80% of the Republican vote.

Because, as Tom Begich belatedly figured out even if he won’t say so, ranked choice voting is a failed experiment, I am voting yes on Ballot Measure 2.

But if Ballot Measure 2 passes the State of Alaska should not resume spending several million dollars every two years to conduct primary elections in order to assist political parties, which are private nongovernmental organizations, select their candidates. Instead, the Alaska Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian Parties can select their candidates at party-funded conventions. Or they can conduct party-funded primary elections by mail or on the Internet.

And if an individual who does not want to join a political party wants to be a candidate, as Bill Walker did, he or she can pay the filing fee and then solicit the signatures required in order to appear as an independent candidate on the general election ballot.

In that regard, if Alaska voters pass Ballot Measure 2 and in 2028 Lisa Murkowski seeks a fifth term in the Senate, because of how little use so many Republicans have had for her ever since her father gave her his seat, if she is a candidate in the Republican primary election she likely will lose. So instead, Lisa should pay the filing fee and then send Scott Kendall to stand in front of Costco and Walmart and solicit the signatures she would need to run as an independent candidate in a multi-candidate general election that she quite likely will win.

Given his prior stalwart service on her behalf I am sure that, if asked, Scott would be happy to render Lisa that additional assistance.

• Donald Craig Mitchell is an Anchorage attorney and author of a two-volume history of the Alaska Native land claims movement and most recently of "Tribal Sovereignty in Alaska: How It Happened, What It Means" (Carolina Academic Press).