A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a Facebook conversation with someone who was convinced that Ranked Choice Voting (one of my favorite voting methods) is a scam. She claimed the 2022 Alaska US House election as her evidence, because it resulted in a Democrat winning what had been a Republican seat. The Alaska election did have a few oddities, at least it seems to me, but in looking at them, I have two conclusions. First, I don’t see any evidence that the oddities invalidated the election. Second, the oddities were not related in any way to Ranked Choice Voting.
First, there were actually two US House elections for the same seat in 2022. From Wikipedia1:
The seat became vacant when 49-year incumbent Republican representative Don Young died on March 18, 2022. A special primary election was held on June 11, while the general election was held alongside the regular primary election on August 16. The filing deadline was on April 1. This was the first election to use the state's new voting system, approved for use with 2020 Alaska Measure 2. Under the new system, all candidates compete in a single blanket primary, with the four candidates receiving the most votes advancing to the general election, which is conducted using instant-runoff voting.
A similar situation happened in Georgia in 2020 when Congressman John Lewis died during a year his seat was up for re-election. A special election was held to finish the last few months of his ending term at the same time as a regular election was held for the upcoming term. In Georgia, the candidates for the regular election didn’t run in the special election, but in Alaska, they did.
To review, you had two elections, four ballots across three dates. Special Primary on June 11th, Special General and Regular Primary on Aug. 16th, and then Regular General on Nov. 8.
First, the results from the June Special Election primary:
The hypothetical “unnamed Republican” had a single-digit lead over all other parties, but the splitting of the vote between sixteen Republicans watered that down. Sarah Palin was leading among Republican candidates, but still, more Republicans voted against Palin than for her. And nearly three out of every four Alaskans voted against Palin.
Al Gross withdrew before the final election in August, leaving three candidates:
Making sense of this, and skipping the Write-in round:
75,799 picked Peltoa as their top candidate.
58,937 picked Palin as their top candidate
Of the 53,810 who picked Begich as their top:
15,457 picked Peltoa as their second-best
27,053 picked Palin as their second-best
14,997 didn’t pick a second-best
Moving on to the Regular Election primary, which was on the same day as the Special Election that we’ve just looked at:
These election results look a lot like the Special General results above, and they tell me that Peltola picked up steam between June and August. Along the way, she even picked up meaningful Republican endorsements23.
Moving on to the final election in November:
Significantly more voters in this election than in the previous. 102,182 more than in June, 77,217 more than in August. With this many voters, the minimum number to win was 131,806.
Peltoa started out with 48.77%. If this were a plurality election, she would have won. But
When the Libertarian candidate was eliminated, his votes were split pretty evenly: 20% going to Peltola, 21% to Palin, and 39% to Beigch. If Palin had gotten every single Libertarian vote at this point, she would have had 73,329. Still only 27% of the vote.
After Beigch was eliminated, Palin would have had to pick up 62,407 Beigch voters in order to cross the finish line. Peltola only had to pick up 2,020. As it happened, Palin picked up 43,072, and Peltola 7,477.
And that, by the numbers, is how the election went down in Alaska. The “open blanket primary” system is odd to those of us who are used to party-specific primaries, but it does mean that fewer candidates are shut out from ever making it to a ballot. Ranked Choice implements the “majority to win” rule, without the huge drop-off in participation that we normally see for a runoff here in Georgia.