In a recent article, I introduced the concept of weaponizing Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) against political candidates to influence elections. If you haven’t read my original post on the subject, you can find it here. In this piece, I will review the idea and present data from past elections to demonstrate that this tactic is feasible.
A quick summary of this strategy is that it might be possible for political parties to control elections in Alaska using RCV. Here is an example of how this could work. Suppose the Democrat party runs one candidate of their own and also runs multiple faux candidates registered as Republicans in a primary election race. After the primary, RCV mandates that the top four vote-getters advance to the general election.
In this example, there will be the real Democrat and real Republican candidates, along with 2 faux Republicans whose allegiance is to the Democrat party. In the general election, this will allow one Democrat to run against three “Republicans.” Two of the Republicans will not be real candidates; they will be Democrat plants.
After the general election, if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, which is likely with 4 candidates, the race goes to an automatic RCV runoff.
The Democratic candidate would likely win the runoff for two reasons. First, the two faux Republicans could politically attack the real Republican right up to election day, alienating voters. This could adversely impact how conservative voters rank the candidates on their RCV ballot. They might put the Democratic candidate they perceive as above the fray, higher on their ballot than the real Republican one who is fighting back against political attacks.
Secondly, the fact that there are 3 Republican candidates hurts their party in the RCV runoff because of exhausted ballots in each runoff round. An exhausted ballot occurs when a voter only chooses one candidate or incorrectly fills out the multiple-choice ballots. With three Republican candidates, multiple runoff rounds will be needed, and some of their ballots will be discarded in each round. With more candidates, it is more likely that Republican ballots would be tossed in each round than Democrat votes, allowing the weaker Democrat to win the election. The number of exhausted ballots in the 2022 election is shown in Table 1, where almost 14,000 Alaska voters had their ballots discarded, swinging the vote to the Democrat candidate.
For these two reasons, Democrat Mary Peltola beat two Republicans in the 2022 election despite getting fewer votes than the Republicans in the first round of the election. Mary Peltola’s 2022 victory was a lucky fluke for Democrats, but it might be possible to achieve a similar result intentionally.
To see if it is possible to repeat this strategy, let’s examine past election data to evaluate the impact of multiple candidates from the same party in the general election. Since RCV was adopted in Alaska, 10 races have had three candidates, with two of them being from the same party. The results are summarized in Table 2 below.
The data shows that if three viable candidates are in the general election and two are from the same party, a third candidate will get about 20% of the votes cast. Even if they are terrible candidates, such as the convicted felon Eric Hafner https://www.newsweek.com/eric-hafner-alaska-candidate-congress-1972047, who ran this year, they will still get some votes. Hafner took 1% of the votes away from Mary Peltola in this year’s congressional race.
Were any elections this year decided by less than 20% of the votes cast? Yes, most were, and if the political parties had chosen to weaponize RCV, the results of several races could have been different. The data shows that weaponizing RCV is a viable tactic.
In the second part of this two-part article, I will show how conservatives could use this strategy to target incumbent candidates in the 2026 election. Here is a preview: The data shows that many incumbents could be defeated, taking power away from the Uniparty running Juneau and giving it back to the voters. More to come in part two of this analysis.
The views expressed here are those of Greg Sarber. Read more Sarber posts at his Seward’s Folly substack.
19 Comments
Cool story. Super far-fetched, but possible. Now do the electoral college and how someone could become president with 23% of the popular vote.
The “popular vote” usually comes largely from democrat-run large cities. The reason the electoral college was formulated by the founders was to cancel out some of the urban advantage so that rural voters would not be totally disadvantaged. Cities and rural communities have different requirements and can generate largely different viewpoints as a result.
DEI for hicks
“……..Super far-fetched, but possible……..”
The Left has been running candidates within the Republican Party for decades as both fiscal and social “conservatives”. Moreover, it’s obvious that sacrificial candidates have already been used in Alaska’s RCV elections. I submit that as soon as the Republican Party masters these kinds of tactics, the Democrat Party and RINOs will be all for the repeal of RCV.
Why is it that the state and federal congress members have switched from Democrat after the election? Seems to happen fairly often in the South. How to win RCV? select Sarah Palin as a candidate.
Really interesting and informative. Great research and writing. RCV needs to be vanquished but it is encouraging to know there are ways to work within the evil clutches.
I’ve said this before, if a candidate doesn’t have enough clout to win on their own merit, then they don’t need to repersent any of us! RCV put RINO Lisa Murkowski in office! we can’t get rid of her. Yes I helped her and voted for her. I’m hoping Trump has congress pass a law if your a Democrat you vote democrat or republican for republican things. Lisa would need to change her R to a D or get out. I figure she will be getting out anyway because RINOS are going to be one of Trumps first ones to go! Lisa needs to retire anyway. When’s the last bill she wrote or passed?
“……..When’s the last bill she wrote or passed?……..”
Let’s hope never. Actually, bills are supposed to originate from the House, and Senators are supposed to represent their states, not the population, in the passage of those bills in the Senate. Since the passage of the 17th Amendment, a huge mistake, the U.S. Senate has become yet another brothel at the mercy of the media machine. States have no representation in Congress anymore.
Thank you for the well researched information on RCV.
we, the people of Alaska need to be educated on how to defeat this evil monster, RCV.
it’s incredibly easy! OUR STUPID IDIOT OF A GOVERNOR CAN DO IT ALL BY HIMSELF! THE POS SIMPLY WONT!
You, the people of Alaska, have voted for RCV twice!
In 2022 Palin directed her voters to vote for Peltola instead of Nick Begich. This is one reason that he lost. Also, in 2022 in the governor’s race, Walker and his democrat “rival” agreed to pool their votes to defeat incumbent Governor Mike Dunleavy in any second ballot count. But the plan was foiled when Dunleavy won on the first ballot count with over 50%. RCV was designed to be weaponized and has already been used that way. I alerted people to this in both elections on another blog, but they kept insisting it was to benefit Murkowski. In short, RCV allows for weaker candidates to band together to defeat stronger ones. This is exactly why Scott Kendall pushed it in the first place. And yes, most of the dark money that funded it came from big Democrat funders.
RCV can also function to cause two General elections in a single election, and delay election results by more than a month. RCV is just another obstacle to fair elections and opens an additional door to FRAUD!!!
Republicans need to learn to fight dirty like the Democrats. That is, they should run two or three fake Democrats to run in races, just as the Democrats would run fake Republicans, so as to divide the Democrats votes, as well. What is good for the goose is good for the gander, so we may as well use their own weapon (RCV) against them.
Merkowski is in her last term. She is done. 4 more years and we will never hear from her again.
Good news is that Trump won! Now we have a chance to get the truth out to millions whose misguided actions were only in response to the lying propaganda legacy media machine! When the truth comes out and accountability starts happening, we’ll get this crap like RCV turned around…!
Interesting take but truth of the matter is we need to do like we have been taught, what works, use the KISS method and go back to basics. KISS as in Keep it
Simple Stupid!
I absolutely detest RCV!!
in 2022 I ran Ross Bielings campaign and we specifically advertised to vote for Julie Coulumbe as well. in this campaign, she won because of the recount. Multiole true Republicans running in the same campaign promoting together works! Thank you Greg Sarver for this lucid narrative. I completely agree with strategic planning an incumbent can be defeated. I believe if Sharon Jackson and Ken McCarthy would have stayed in the race and encouraged RCV together Kelly Merrick would have been defeated.