Ranked-choice voting, which helped Democratic candidates win Republican-leaning House seats in Alaska and Maine, is expanding in the U.S. despite criticism that it disenfranchises voters and can elect candidates who are not favored by the majority of the electorate.
The U.S. Virgin Islands will use ranked-choice voting for the first time in a Republican presidential nominating contest on Feb. 8.
Advocates say ranked-choice voting is a nonpartisan election reform that gives voters more choices and leads to better, more issues-focused campaigns and fairer outcomes.
Critics say it’s a scheme backed by Democratic megadonor George Soros and other wealthy liberals. They say the method is confusing and complicated, leads to the disqualification of thousands of ballots and allows marginal candidates to prevail over the choices of the majority of voters.
Ranked-choice voting requires voters to pick their favorite candidate on the ballot and rank their preferences out of the remainder of the listed candidates.
If no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, election officials retabulate the results by first eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes.
For voters whose first choice is knocked out, their second-choice selection is counted in the retabulation.
The process repeats until a candidate wins more than half the vote.
Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, compared ranked-choice elections to “putting the votes in a blender.”
He said the method does not honor the will of the majority of the electorate but does the bidding of wealthy megadonors, most of them liberals, who want to eliminate hard-right conservative and fringe liberal candidates from public office regardless of their popularity with voters.
The list of donors supporting ranked-choice voting initiatives includes the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations and Kathryn Murdoch, a frequent donor to liberal causes who was a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Another big donor backing the effort is former Obama fundraiser and Democratic donor Katherine Gehl.
Republican megadonors Ken Griffin and Michael Porter have funded ranked-choice voting initiatives, but Mr. Walter said, “It’s overwhelmingly a crusade funded by left-wing Democrats.”
Mr. Walter said ranked-choice voting undercuts the primary process, which hurts both major political parties but empowers ultra-wealthy donors.
“I see it as a further weakening of the two-party system. And as bad as the two parties are, they are a lot more accountable and a lot better than the megadonors,” Mr. Walter said.
Ranked-choice voting has rapidly expanded in the U.S. from about 10 cities in 2016 to 50 cities and counties this year. Alaska and Maine will use ranked-choice voting for statewide offices and the presidential election in November.
The question of allowing ranked-choice voting in statewide elections will be on the 2024 ballot in Oregon and Nevada. Initiatives are underway for voters in Idaho, Colorado and Montana to consider replacing partisan primaries with a top-four, ranked-choice election.
Ranked-choice voting will play out in the Republican presidential primary for the first time on Feb. 8 in the Virgin Islands, where six candidates are listed on the ballot. Only former President Donald Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley remain in the race to compete for the territory’s nine delegates in the caucuses.
Ranked-choice voting will elect primary and caucus winners for Democrats in Wyoming and Alaska. Maine will use the method to determine the winners of its Republican and Democratic presidential primaries.
Will Mantell, spokesman for FairVote, said “2024 is going to be a very exciting year for ranked-choice voting.”
Heritage Foundation scholar Hans von Spakovsky calls those elected to office through ranked-choice voting “faux winners” because they are often not the first picks of most of the electorate.
Mr. Mantell said multiple-choice balloting ensures the winning candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, even though the victor is often backed by a compilation of the first-, second-, third- or even the fourth-ranked choices of voters.
He said this method “changes incentives” by forcing candidates to broaden their appeal to voters. The process, Mr. Mantell said, produces “candidates who can actually win a majority, and maybe more moderating candidates who are able to speak to more voters.”
In 2022, ranked-choice voting gave Alaska its first Democratic House seat in nearly 50 years.
Mary Peltola, the Democrat, prevailed over two Republicans, Sarah Palin and Nicholas Begich, after three rounds of ranked-choice tabulation.
In the first round, the two Republicans won a combined 130,835 votes. Ms. Peltola received 128,755.
After redistributing the votes of the fourth-place candidate, Libertarian Chris Bye, and redistributing Mr. Begich’s votes in the third round, Ms. Peltola finished in first place with 55% of the vote, 10 percentage points ahead of Ms. Palin, the former governor and a favorite among the state’s most conservative Republicans.
Mr. Mantell described Ms. Peltola as the kind of moderate lawmaker whom ranked-choice voting seeks to elevate to public office, but she has voted more than 95% of the time in favor of President Biden’s agenda. Her congressional voting record, tabulated by the political statistics website FiveThirtyEight, aligns her more closely with the president than far-left “Squad” members Reps. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
In 2018, ranked-choice voting in Maine’s midterm elections for House races unseated Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin, who initially won the most votes in the race for the state’s Republican-leaning 2nd Congressional District seat.
Mr. Poliquin’s 46.3% of the vote wasn’t enough to secure a victory outright under the rules of ranked-choice voting, which the state’s voters adopted in 2016.
Mr. Poliquin was leading Democrat Jared Golden by 2,171 votes in the first round but ended up losing the seat.
The second choice of voters who picked third-place candidate Will Hoar in the first round was used to tabulate a second-round winner. They favored Mr. Golden, who prevailed by about 3,500 votes.
Mr. Poliquin unsuccessfully sued to stop the use of ranked-choice ballot counting in the 2018 contest, and his defeat helped Democrats reclaim the House majority.
Mr. Golden was reelected in 2020 and 2022, both times on the first round of balloting. Mr. Golden has voted for Mr. Biden’s policies in Congress 88% of the time, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight.
Chris Saxman, a Republican who served in the Virginia House of Delegates from 2002 to 2010 and now heads the pro-business group Virginia Free, said ranked-choice voting in the state’s 2022 Republican primary helped enable Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s upset win over Democrat Terry McAuliffe by sidelining a more hard-line conservative candidate, state Sen. Amanda Chase, who might have defeated Mr. Youngkin in a traditional primary format.
Mr. Youngkin, along with Republican lieutenant governor candidate Winsome Earle-Sears and Republican attorney general candidate Jason Miyares, were able to jump into the general election campaign much sooner because they avoided a bloody political brawl and had more money “to define themselves to the electorate before Democrats did.”
Mr. Youngkin’s win put a Republican in the Virginia governor’s mansion for the first time since 2014 as the state leans more toward Democrats.
“This was the last-gasp effort for Republicans to win a statewide election for probably a generation,” Mr. Saxman said.
Virginia, like many other states, permits ranked-choice voting only in party-run and local elections.
The voting method is more complicated, however. As a result, thousands of ballots have been thrown out because voters did not follow the proper format. The elderly, minorities and those not proficient in English are more likely to have their ballots discarded when ranked-choice voting is employed, a 2024 study found.
Confusion and complications in tabulating ranked-choice votes have delayed election results, sometimes for weeks.
In New York City’s 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, which essentially determined the winner in the general election, it took two weeks for the New York Board of Elections to declare Eric Adams the winner and 57 days to release the precinct-level results after ranked-choice voting was used on a ballot listing 13 candidates.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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