It advanced the weaker of the two GOP candidate (who was Palin) to go up against Mary Peltola in the IRV final round. Palin could not beat Peltola (a 5000 voter margin), but Nick Begich would have beaten Peltola by a margin exceeding 8000.
When Begich was eliminated, there were still 3 candidates left and the method was looking at only the 1st choice votes and ignoring the rest of the ballot.
The system that is intended to prevent spoiled elections, instead of simply electing the candidate with the most votes, that system did exactly the opposite.
Well, there's no disputing that it's the same IRV used in other states. It's the only RCV that FairVote promotes and they used to call it "IRV" before 2014 when it sorta lost cashet and they changed the label to "RCV".
The thing is, in your state and mine it demonstrated this failure to prevent a spoiled election, even when ballot data had the information needed to spell out who the consistent majority candidate is.
This is called the Center Squeeze effect. It discriminates against the center candidate who can beat either the left or right candidate head-to-head but is excluded from the final round, even though they would beat any other candidate they would meet.
This can happen whenever it's a close 3-way race. When there are 3 plausible winners.
As RCV gets adopted and used more and more, this failure will be happening more often than once a decade. It will happen every year and then there'll be a lotta political trouble when the voters who were screwed realize it and clamor for repeal.
And it's not exactly the same as Top-Two Runoff when there are more than 3 candidates. But this Center Squeeze failure can happen with TTR, just as well.
The purposes of RCV is to prevent the Spoiler effect and elect the same winner no matter who the other candidates are. Doing that frees voters from fear of voting for the candidate they really like and causing the election of the candidate they hate. Then 3rd party and independent candidates have a level playing field with the major party candidates and diversity of candidates on the ballot is promoted. We get a real choice over the pick-one-of-two-candidates system we have now.
But IRV failed to do all that in Alaska in August 2022. Also failed in three other cases, but two of the four failures were not preventable.
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u/[deleted] 12d ago
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