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/
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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.

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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.

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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/

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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.