Trump’s post about Alaska’s election laws has a rank smell

By Larry Persily

Alaskans in November will decide for the third time on ranked-choice voting. They approved it in 2020, rejected an initiative in 2024 to repeal it, and now will vote this fall on another repeal initiative.

The opponents are persistent, and they are good at raising money to run petition signature drives. But that doesn’t mean they are right.

The successful 2020 ranked-choice ballot measure made big changes for the better in the state’s election laws. It eliminated partisan primaries in favor of an open primary, where the top four vote-getters advance to the November general election.

The opponents don’t like the system. It reduces the power of political parties to decide the candidates of their liking. As if political parties should be the gatekeepers of elections.

It changed the general election from winner-take-all — no matter how far under 50% of the votes the leading candidate earned — to essentially a runoff without having to conduct a runoff. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes in the general election, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated and those votes are redistributed according to the voter’s second and third choices until a candidate emerges with support from more than 50% of voters.

Consensus is good. Certainly better than divisiveness, partisan politics and immobilized government. Just look at Congress, which can’t seem to manage the basic tasks of its job because of the deep-canyon divide between parties and the Divider in Chief, the president.

This fall’s repeal initiative would do one more piece of damage to open and informative elections in Alaska: It would eliminate reporting laws that require campaign groups in the state to share the names of their top funders. If the initiative succeeds, Alaska elections would return to the darkest world of dark money, with no public light on who is financing which side of the fight.

Of course, people who pour money into elections often like hiding in anonymity, but that doesn’t make it good for the public.

This is a big decision for Alaskans, one that voters should decide on the merits and whether they believe political parties and rich donors should be in charge.

The last thing Alaska needs is for President Donald Trump to take a break from the war he started in Iran, from the rising gasoline and diesel and jet fuel prices he caused, from the obscene social media posts he thumbs at the world, to insert himself into the ranked-choice voting decision.

But insert himself he did last week, posting to his misnamed Truth Social site: “The Wonderful People of Alaska desperately want to restore Free, Fair and Honest Elections in their Great State, and get rid of their disastrous and very fraudulent Ranked-Choice Voting.”

I agree with him on one thing: Alaskans are wonderful people. But the rest of his post is his usual deceitful, dishonest claims. There is no evidence from the two Alaska ranked-choice election years, 2022 and 2024, of any “disastrous and very fraudulent” voting. Unless he means conservative Republicans who lost their races because more than half the voters chose someone else.

That’s really what this is all about. Sore losers, unwilling to accept the responsibility for putting up candidates that do not reflect a majority of voters.

I thought that’s how elections are supposed to work. Majority rules. Not a loud minority, cheered on by the loudest sore loser ever. 

• Larry Persily is the publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel, which first published this column.