You are never required to rank anyone you dislike; leave those blank. But if you mark only a single 1st choice and leave the rest empty, you are choosing to risk exhaustion. Ranking a 2nd (and 3rd, 4th if you want) among the candidates you find more acceptable than the alternatives keeps your ballot alive and gives it a chance to matter if your top pick is out.
In short: the old single-choice habit is fine for the primary. In Alaska’s RCV general election, however, it is a calculated risk. Sometimes your ballot stays fully effective, and sometimes it is eliminated from the decisive rounds.
Ballot exhaustion (Alaska calls these “inactive ballots”) means your ballot stops counting once every candidate you ranked has been eliminated. It no longer has any say in who wins among the remaining candidates. Your vote is effectively out of the later rounds that decide the election.
How Alaska’s system actually works
Alaska uses a top-four open (“jungle”) primary followed by ranked-choice voting (RCV) in the general election.
In the primary: Everyone runs on one ballot. You pick exactly one candidate. That is the only option. The top four vote-getters advance to the general, regardless of party affiliation. Voting for only one person is the normal, safe, and complete way to vote here. Your ballot fully counts for that candidate.
In the general election, you will see the top four finalists on the ballot and can rank them 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in order of preference. Ranking is optional, you are allowed to mark only one, but that choice carries a real risk.
What happens if you only mark one candidate in the general?
Counting works in rounds. Everyone’s 1st-choice votes are tallied. If no one has more than 50% of the active ballots, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated.
Ballots that ranked the eliminated candidate as their highest remaining choice transfer to their next ranking (if they have one). This process repeats itself until one candidate has a majority of the still-active ballots or only two remain.
If you only ranked one person and that person is eliminated, your ballot has no next ranking left. It becomes inactive/exhausted. Alaska law (AS 15.15.350) defines an inactive ballot as one that “does not rank any continuing candidate.” Once inactive, it is no longer counted for anyone.
Your ballot counted while your candidate was still in, but it is thrown out of every subsequent round.
The final majority is calculated only among the ballots that still have a ranking for a surviving candidate. Exhausted ballots shrink that pool
ALASKA WATCHMAN DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX
Why “just vote for one” only works sometimes
It is completely safe and correct in the primary but is safe in the general only if your single candidate either wins outright in the first round or stays in until the end. It is not safe if your candidate is eliminated early or mid-process (very common when there are three or four competitive finalists). Your ballot then has zero influence on the final choice between the remaining candidates.
This is exactly what happened in the 2022 special U.S. House election. When Nick Begich was eliminated, roughly 11,000–11,300 of the ballots that ranked him first had no further rankings and were exhausted. Those voters had no further say in the final Peltola-vs-Palin round and gave the election to a Democrat even though nearly 60% of the vote was for a Republican.
The views expressed here are those of the author.
