Weird stuff could happen in Alaska...

Rolling out ranked choice voting for a simultaneous special election and general election primary for the House seat could lead to strange results

Voters in Alaska go to the polls today for BOTH a House special election (to serve between now and January) and non-partisan Final Four primaries for the same House seat (for a full two year term), a Senate seat and the governorship.

All the races are pretty interesting, but I want to focus on the House, where former governor Sarah Palin is trying for a political comeback against another Republican, Nick Begich III (whose grandfather and uncle both served as Democrats in Congress), and former Democratic state legislator Mary Peltola. I also learned today that there are six “certified write in candidates.” (Please don’t ask how that happened - I thought it was a Final Four system (independent Al From came in third in the primary but dropped out)).

Recall that the special election will used ranked choice voting (RCV), which was put in place by referendum in 2020.

Assuming all the write-in candidates wash out quickly, the expectation is that Peltola will win the most first place votes, but probably won’t make 50%. This prediction is pretty solid given that Biden took 42% of the vote in 2020 and the unsuccessful Democrat running for the House in 2020 took 45%. Unless Begich or Palin win well over 2/3rds of the remaining vote (which is unlikely given that the split in the primary was Palin 27%/Begich 19%), Pelota comes in first and either Palin or Begich comes in third and gets eliminated.

Now, under normal circumstances, one would think that Republicans would rank Begich and Palin #1 & #2. So the second place candidate would get the vast majority of the votes of the third place candidate and most likely exceed 50%. Normally, one of the Republicans wins.

But Sarah Palin is no ordinary candidate. And this is no normal situation with RCV being used for the first time and a re-do general election happening with the exact same candidates less than three months from now.

What is Palin up to?

What caught my ear, and made me decide to write on this before any results became available, is that Palin is apparently telling her voters to vote only for her on their ballot (what I call a “bullet” vote or others might call a “single ranked” vote). If she is the one eliminated, but her voters don’t rank anyone else, then Begich might not get enough second rank votes to overcome Pelota’s lead. Pelota, the Democrat gets elected, maybe with just a plurality.

While Democrats might cheer, this would be a disaster for ranked choice voting. I could easily see the Republican majority in Alaska to try to eliminate it either in the legislature or by referendum.

If you are in favor of RCV, you don’t want its first high profile use to produce a highly unusual result. How unusual is it for a Republican to lose in the House? Very. The last Democrat to hold the at-large seat in Alaska was - you guessed it - Nick Begich Sr. who served from January, 1971 until his death in a plane accident in December, 1972. In politics, fifty years is a long winning streak.

Now, why would Palin tell her voters to bullet vote and hurt the Republican Party?

One explanation this that is who Sarah Palin is. She is not a party person; she is not a product of the Republican establishment. In fact, her biggest battles during her governorship were with the party and corporate elites. So telling her followers to bullet vote and not rank Begich #2 is giving a middle finger to the Alaska Republican Party that has been a thorn in her side and, by the way, endorsed Begich over her in the special election race.

The other reason to do this has to do with the upcoming election in November for the full two-year term. Perhaps Palin thinks she is in a better position for this race if Pelota wins instead of Begich.

How so?

Well, if she has proven that she has the power to distort the ranked choice voting system to end up electing a Democrat, perhaps she thinks that will influence enough voters in the general election to rank her over Begich in the first round in November. Then she gets the #2 ranking from Begich’s voters (who are more party loyalists than Palin’s), prevails over the Democrat, and is the hero. Since the race for control of the House might tighten up between now and November, with possibly every seat counting for the majority - this is not an entirely unrealistic scenario. Palin is keeping her eye on the real prize - the general election.

Another unorthodox result would be if some Begich votes bullet vote or maybe even fill in the Democrat over Palin. This is unlikely, but not impossible. Palin is a lightning rod. She quit the governorship and (strangely) has spent most of the race outside of Alaska raising money and basking in her celebrity. Some Republicans just might not be willing to stomach ranking her on their ballot.

I wrote last week that RCV could be better for American democracy by helping to prevent the election of extremists in either direction. But this analysis shows that there is no ideal election system - they all come with their warts and potential unfairnesses. That said, I am still for RCV.

One thing for sure - we won’t know what happens for a while. Alaska’s vote counting system is notoriously slow. And that was before RCV.

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Another mind game: Could RCV save Liz Cheney - who is almost certain to lose her primary for the at-large Wyoming House race today?

Well, polls show her to be the second choice of Republican primary voters, so in a Final Four or Final Five system - she certainly survives the primary and gets to the general election. The partisan split in Wyoming is 71% Republican and 15% Democrat, with the remainder unaffiliated, libertarian or “other.” One poll shows that Cheney is losing about 2:1 among Republican primary voters. If that is what happened in a ranked choice general election, the top Republican could potentially get to 50% in the first round and win. If not, Cheney would need to sweep the second place votes of all the Democrats and non-Republicans - a very unlikely circumstance. So no, RCV probably would not help Liz Cheney.