What the Alaska Results Say about Ranked-Choice Voting
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.
The initial results from this race had 58.7% of voters casting a ballot for a Republican, either Sarah Palin or Nick Begich III, compared to a mere 39.7% of ballots for Democrat (and eventual winner) Mary Peltola. And it’s worth noting that even after Begich was eliminated and his ballots reapportioned, fully 50% of his voters went to Palin; another 21% listed no second-choice selection, and finally 29% were redistributed to Peltola. The issue was that Sarah Palin individually (rather than both “R”s considered together) only had 30.9% of votes to begin with — she wound up losing, 51.5% to 48.5%.
It's worth looking at these outcomes in light of the usual promises made by proponents of ranked-choice voting. Namely, proponents say that ranked-choice voting promotes majority rule and minimizes strategic voting. This result challenges both of those promises.
The majority rule question is obvious enough: 60% of Alaskans voted for a Republican, and yet the election went to the Democrat. Anyone who responds by just reiterating the specifics of Begich’s elimination and his votes’ reapportionment misses the point: Do we want an electoral system that tallies against common sense in that way?
Even if someone argues that a generic Republican wasn’t on the ballot, only Palin and Begich were, it remains overwhelmingly plausible that a strong majority of voters preferred Begich to Peltola. Counts of exact ballot configurations (“Palin-Begich-Peltola”, etc.) haven’t been published, but we can work with the numbers that have been: If first-round Palin voters preferred Begich to Peltola by at least 37 percentage points, then he would have been clearly preferred. That might look like an eye-popping margin, but in the context of Palin voters acquiescing to another Republican over a Democrat, it’s hardly implausible.
This dovetails directly into the strategic voting question. In a typical, plurality-winner system, Republican-leaning voters would foresee that Peltola can garner enough support to win if Republicans split between Begich and Palin, thus feeling pressure to coalesce around one or the other. People generally dislike this feature of our electoral system, and the ranked-choice promise, in the words of advocacy group FairVote, is that “With RCV, voters can honestly rank candidates in order of choice.”
Now, it’s a mathematical result of choice theory that this is naively wrong — any election with more than three candidates, more than three voters, and only one victor is liable to become subject to strategic voting. But the Alaska results helpfully show us what that might look like: A partisan but relatively middle-of-the-road candidate (Begich) whose support is real but not as strong as either more extreme candidate. He’s eliminated, and just enough (not even one third) of his supporters peel off to the other side to keep what they perceive as extremism on their own side from ascending to power. This puts Palin voters in a strategic mindset: They honestly prefer Palin to Begich, but can count on enough of Begich’s followers swerving left in a second round that they’d rather give Begich their first place vote to shield against an outcome that they really dislike.
Again, the inescapable nature of strategic voting has been known as a mathematical truth for a long time. The ranked-choice promises to the contrary depend on the exact workings of that being obscure. But the Alaska results shed light on it.
Ranked-choice proponents will often construct favorable hypothetical examples that depict small fractions of fringe candidate votes, suggesting Ross Perot- or Ralph Nader-like numbers, gradually snowballing towards the middle. But realistically, that’s implausible, and the Alaska outcome is liable to be the rule rather than the exception. After all, the more middle-of-the-road a candidate is, the lower is their enthusiastic fanbase for whom they are the first-place preference. They just aren’t that likely to escape elimination long enough to reap the benefits of reapportioned votes and “majority support.”
Again, the winning party in Alaska hadn’t even captured 40% of the initial vote. The political middle might just be hollowed out by ranked-choice incentives — even as voters remain stuck in strategic conundrums over how to order their candidates.
This election reminds us in stark terms of things that, up until now, were merely theoretical truths. Ranked-choice voting will not free us from the necessity of strategic voting, and it can easily crowd out the moderate candidates it’s supposed to empower, robbing the majority of their expressed preference.
Noah Diekemper is a senior research analyst at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
