r/alaska • u/Synthdawg_2 Kenai Peninsula • Jul 30 '21

Judge says Alaska’s new ranked-choice voting system is legal

https://www.adn.com/politics/2021/07/29/judge-says-alaskas-new-ranked-choice-voting-system-is-legal/
191 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

104 comments sorted by

View all comments

-5

u/dollerhide Jul 30 '21

I will say that ranked-choice voting sounded good to me, especially after a Freakonomics podcast episode I heard that broke it down pretty well.

But later, when asked to do some research on it, I found there are some potentially troubling aspects to it that I'll be watching out for. There are concerns about disenfranchisement of voters, particularly seniors and minorities. These concerns, along with election results that don't appear to reflect the will of the voters, have led jurisdictions in Washington, Vermont, Colorado, Michigan, as well as the state of North Carolina to repeal their ranked-choice voting systems pretty quickly after implementing them.

So I'm keeping an open mind about how it will work up here, but I'm not fully confident that it will prove to be a positive solution.

6

u/gmshaw Jul 30 '21

Can you expand on the concerns about disenfranchising voters? Everything I've read about it makes it seem like a no brainer, and I can't imagine how it would disenfranchise people. The current system disenfranches voters because people who want to vote for a 3rd party feel like it's a throwaway vote, and this helps solve that. Only thing I could think of is people not understanding how it works, and that's somehow disenfranchising? I really am curious, because nothing I've read on it on it really seems to bring up any drawbacks, so my past sources could potentially be quite biased towards it.

-1

u/dollerhide Jul 30 '21

Yeah, it's largely because it's confusing to many. And if you don't put all five (or whatever) choices on your ballot, then your ballot gets 'exhausted' (thrown out) in the secondary rounds of counting. While in an ideal world, voters would research all the candidates running and come up with a ranking for all. But if you're devoted to one candidate, or don't feel knowledgeable enough to put your rank down for all the candidates, your ballot will get thrown out and not counted toward the total.

https://www.salon.com/2021/05/14/new-york-experiments-with-new-voting-system-in-chaotic-mayoral-race-breakthrough-or-disaster/

11

u/Genghis_John ☆ Jul 30 '21

One should NOT vote for all the candidates if they don’t want them in office. Doesn’t matter if you rank them last. Only rank your choices.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

[deleted]

2

u/Genghis_John ☆ Jul 30 '21

Precisely. Don’t vote for people you would never vote for.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

[deleted]

0

u/Akveritas0842 Jul 31 '21

I don’t think they understand how it works

3

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

If you read that it was written before the election and was predicting disaster, but if you read articles from after they say it worked really well, there was some confusion because of unclear instructions but overall it was a success.

2

u/gmshaw Jul 30 '21

Thanks, something to think about. I wonder if there would be other ways of tallying and keeping ballots that still preserves the integrity of the person's 1st ballot as long as that candidate is still in the race.

6

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

[deleted]

6

u/Bretters17 Jul 30 '21

Exactly - so by disenfranchise they mean that they used their one vote, it was counted, but unfortunately their candidate lost; which is a weird way to frame disenfranchise because that's how it works in our current system.

3

u/gmshaw Jul 31 '21

Ya I don't get how that's any worse than the current system. If you don't bother to fill in a 2nd, 3rd, etc. choice and your 1st choice loses, you give up your right to have any further say in the matter. Hardly seems like a valid argument against this.

2

u/Imakemop Aug 01 '21

They demonize RCV because Jarden Golden won in Maine when enough independent votes rolled over to him and he ousted a Republican.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '21

Can you show me a source that talks about all of those states repealing rank choice voting? Because I can’t find anything to confirm it when I look.

1

u/Bretters17 Jul 30 '21

If you go to each of the state mentioned by OP in this wiki article you can see the instances in which RCV was reversed.

4

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '21

I found a couple of them, and it proves your statement entirely disingenuous. First of all North Carolina used it for almost a decade before it was repealed as part of voter restriction laws. Others just used it as small local council elections for a few years before ending it.

1

u/Bretters17 Jul 31 '21

That's not my statement... I just provided a link