In November, Alaska have a chance to do away with the state’s controversial and often pointless ranked-choice voting system, which was narrowly approved by voters back in 2020.

In addition to discarding the traditional voting system, in which each voter chooses a single candidate in each race, RCV also eliminated the historic party primary system.

Up until 2022, the primary served to weed out candidates who had no legitimate shot at winning in the general election. This allowed parties, and voters, to rally around a single candidate in the general, contrasting them with the other parties’ top candidates.

Under the current RCV system, however, the primary election on Aug. 20 is largely pointless in the overwhelming majority of races.

With RCV the top four candidates in every race automatically advance to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation. If there are only three candidates (or less) in a primary race, all of the candidates advance to the general.

This year, 50 seats are up for grabs in the Alaska Legislature, with a total of 115 candidates vying for office. Only two out of 50 races, however, have more than four candidates running in the primary. The remaining 48 races have four or fewer candidates, which means none of them will be eliminated in the primary, regardless of how many votes they earn.

In fact, only three candidates (2.6% of the pool) running for seats in the Alaska Legislature will be eliminated in the Aug. 20 primary.

Prior to RCV, 28 candidates would have been eliminated this year, affecting 19 out of 50 primary contests. Under that former party primary system, voters were allowed to choose their top candidate to run in the general. Now, however, there will be many general election races in which two or more Republicans are running against a single Democrat, thereby splintering Republican support.

RCV also allows candidates to simply claim they are Republican without any substantial backing from Republican voters, since all voters regardless of party affiliation, can vote for their preferred candidate in the primary or general contests.

In effect, this allows nefarious primary voters to back candidates who may claim a certain party affiliation, but do not actually share the party’s values or agree with their platforms. Essentially, closet Democrats could claim to be Republicans, earn votes from Democratic voters in the primary, and make it to the general under the guise of being a Republicans.

Since the general election will include up to four candidates in each race, voters will be asked to rank the candidates in order of preference. A candidate needs a simple majority of the vote (50 percent + 1) to be declared the winner in the first round of voting. However, if no candidate wins a simple majority in round one, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated from the running. Voters who selected that candidate as their first choice have their second-choice votes redistributed to the remaining candidates. This process continues in subsequent rounds until one candidate receives a simple majority.

This allows closet Democrats to siphon off support for the true Republican-backed candidate in round one. Once the closet Democrat is eliminated, the second-place votes for this person (which in many cases will be for the true Democrat) are then awarded to the Democrat.

That wouldn’t be possible under the older primary system, where Democrats had to run against fellow Democrats, and Republicans against Republicans, with the end result being a bonified Democrat running against a legitimate Republican in the general election.

While the Nov. 5 election will be done using RCV, voters have the opportunity to repeal this convoluted system and restore traditional party primaries for future elections.

Click here to support the Alaska Watchman.