The American political world was shaken when results from Alaska’s August 16th special election were finally tabulated and a Democrat was elected to fill out the rest of the state’s ongoing congressional term. But the victor’s partisan affiliation routinely shared space in headlines with the fact that this election had another novel component: Alaska’s newly adopted ranked-choice voting.
Since ranked-choice has been making inroads in different jurisdictions across America, reactions to this result have been strong. “Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections,” said U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR). This reaction is overbroad — the results of ranked-choice (rather than our usual plurality-winner system) depend heavily on the specifics of a given race. Nevertheless, the results in Alaska are useful in showing us how ranked-choice voting does not live up to its hype.
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