(PresidentialWire.com)- In a special election held to fill Republican Rep. Don Young’s vacant seat in the House, Democrats prevailed on Wednesday when former representative Mary Peltola defeated former Republican Governor and Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin.
The election marked the first time the state used the recently adopted ranked-choice voting method, in which voters rate candidates from best to worst rather than selecting a specific candidate for whom to cast their ballot. In 2020, Alaskan voters narrowly approved the system.
According to election experts Hans von Spakovsky and J. Christian Adams, the system is all about political power, not about what is best for the American people and sustaining our great republic.
Under the ranked-choice voting system, it frequently happens that no candidate receives a majority of the vote in the first round. In this scenario, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the voters who selected that candidate as their first choice are counted as having selected their second option as their first choice.
Under a ranked-choice voting system, many voters may simply have their votes ignored through a process known as “ballot exhaustion.” For instance, if a voter selects only two of the five candidates on their ballot, and those two candidates are eliminated before the run-off, there will be no third candidate to count as the voter’s top selection. The rounds are continuously relied on until a “winner” is determined, so these votes are simply unheard.
2018 saw the system’s adoption in Maine. Later that year, an NPR article declared that Democratic candidate Jared Golden had defeated Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin to win Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Despite being behind Poliquin in the initial count of votes, he won. According to Pew, according to Maine’s newly implemented method, nearly 9,000 ballots were not counted in the state’s election.
According to the source, the other ballots were excluded from the final tally because they did not rank Adam Cote and Janet Mills as the top two contenders. “That equals more than 6% of the original ballots,” the speaker said.
Do we don’t need a system that’s hard to understand in a time when trust in election integrity is already low?
When rounds are tabulated, ranked-choice voting may cause an excessive number of votes to be disqualified. In a democracy that uses ranked-choice voting, voters are less likely to feel their opinions are being heard.
