Call me old-fashioned, but when it comes to voting, I like to keep things simple. One person, one vote, and the person with the most votes wins. If there are a lot of candidates and none gets a majority, I’m okay with a runoff election between the top two candidates.
Anything more than this makes it complicated — too complicated for most people to tolerate. Yet, we often hear people advocating for such things as fusion voting, which we have in New York State, or ranked-choice voting, which is currently gumming up the works in Alaska.
In the wake of the death of Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) who passed away in March, we’re seeing a spectacular mess unfold. Things are so bad up there right now that Sarah Montalbano of the Wall Street Journal says that ranked-choice voting has made “a joke” of the process.
“Advocates of ranked-choice voting say it elevates centrist candidates, keeps campaigns positive, and promotes debate of important issues. That isn’t how it’s going in Alaska,” she writes. “The Last Frontier is in the middle of an experiment that has confused voters, popularized fringe candidates and could lead to unrepresentative outcomes.”
Montalbano says the process of replacing Young “has sown confusion,” thanks to ranked-choice voting. “Alaskans remain unclear how ranked-choice voting works despite millions spent on education efforts by state agencies and progressive cheerleaders like Alaskans for Better Elections.”
What’s the problem? Well, the Official Division of Elections instructs voters to “rank as many or as few candidates as you like.” But if your first choice is eliminated, “ballots without second, third or fourth-place preferences won’t count.” This creates the possibility that candidates without true popular support could emerge victorious. So, if you vote for just one candidate — as people have traditionally done in the past — and no one wins outright in the first round, tough cookies.
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It stands to reason that leftists would have been the force behind this garbage system. For some reason, they’re always the ones who want to make things more complicated. And don’t tell me this isn’t because they want confusion, to make it easier for them to game the system. But even if you forget the potential to exploit the confusing process, the ranked-choice system undeniably puts voters in the tough position of being forced to vote for multiple candidates they may not like in order to prevent their ballots from being made irrelevant if they only vote for one candidate and that candidate doesn’t meet the 50% threshold. Purists for “one person, one vote” are essentially penalized in favor of those who vote for multiple candidates in the same election.
Remember when voting more than once was a crime called voter fraud?
There’s something undemocratic about ranked-choice voting, and I can’t understand why anyone would argue this is a fairer way to hold elections. Technically, there is nothing illegal with this method, but is this really the best way to fix the so-called two-party system? I don’t think so. The two-party system is far from perfect, and it’s certainly not what the Founding Fathers wanted, but it’s how things ended up. I don’t know what the solution is, but I know ranked-choice voting is not it.
