[I started this over a week ago. Since then, there's been a lot written about people dropping out of different races, how a couple of politicians have been blocked from running because their disclosures were incomplete.
My basic message here is that both the Republicans and the Democrats are signaling to the public that they don't have confidence in Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). Or in voters actually using it. This is a shame because the Right has put a proposal on the November ballot to abolish RCV. The Democrats, in three key races - US House and Senate, and Alaska governor's race, have discouraged (apparently more forcefully than that) Democrats from competing with each other in the general election. To me that indicates distrust in voters being smart enough to actually use RCV to rank the Democrats on the ballot.
From what I can tell, looking at the 2024 US House race, a fair number of voters utilized their RCV option to rank candidates. But the two extra candidates (besides the main Democrat (Mary Peltola) and the main Republican (Nick Begich) were very marginal candidates - one in prison in New York and the other in the Alaska Independence Party. My belief is that both the candidates and the public need to learn how to use this process and it's likely the voters are smarter than the politicians think.]
We know the Republicans don't believe in it. They opposed it strongly from the beginning and they're behind Proposition 2 which would take Alaska back to the old system. (Prop 2, and this is important, would also get rid of open primaries - their real target - and rules about disclosure of people who contribute to PACs. You can read all 35 pages of Prop.2 here.)
When RCV was first being introduced, the Democratic leadership opposed Ranked Choice Voting (and the open primaries attached to the initiative), but came around to support RCV.
The biggest benefit of the RCV package that Alaskans passed, would appear to be the bi-partisan majorities in the state House and Senate. By getting rid of closed primaries, Alaskans prevented parties from electing the most extreme candidates in their party. With open primaries (vote for one candidate), the top four candidates get to the general election ballot (Ranked Choice - you can vote your first - fourth choices). It's resulted in more moderate legislators, who are able to work together and pass bills. At least that seems to be the outcome.
Our first RCV election - two key Republican candidates (Sarah Palin and Nick Begich) for US House seemed to siphon off votes from each other and Democrat Mary Peltola was elected. The next round, the top two Republican candidates for the House worked out a deal where Nancy Dahlstrom withdrew, and Nick Begich defeated Mary Peltola.
This current election (2026) we've seen lots of shenanigans, starting with the GOP controlled Division of Elections leaving candidate Daniel J. Sullivan off the US Senate ballot on the grounds (that exist no where in the law) that he wasn't a real candidate, that he wanted to confuse voters into thinking he was our sitting Senator, Dan S. Sullivan.
The Alaska Supreme Court required that he be put back on the ballot. He did reappear, but without a party affiliation (he was a registered Republican) and they added "Incumbent" to the sitting Senator's name (though the regs prohibit any honorifics).
Then voters began getting close to a million dollars with of flyers and social media ads pushing two out-of-state candidates (yes that's legal) who were identified as progressive and an Alaska Native candidate who is listed as a Democratic Socialist and trashing leading Democratic candidate Mary Peltola. The strategy, apparently, was to get left leaning candidates on the final ballot to draw votes from Peltola.
They did get David Leslie (the Alaska Native candidate) on the general election ballot, but Daniel J. Sullivan also made it. How many of his votes were 'confused with Daniel S" and how many were intentional because of all the publicity he got from the attempts to wipe him off the ballot, we probably will never know.
So that's the Republican story.
But the Democrats seem to not believe the voters can handle RCV either. First, before the primary, Democratic candidate Matt Schultz withdrew from the race, taking the only serious Democratic candidate out of the election. He says we wasn't getting the party and financial support he needed. That left Nonpartisan Bill Hill, who got support from the normal liberal support groups - labor unions, the environmental crowd.
Now Democrat Tom Begich (the uncle of GOP Rep Nick Begich) has withdrawing from the general election (and the ballot) to support Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins (JKT). JKT got 36,961 votes (22.5%) in the primary. Begich got 34,149 votes (20.8%) They were the two top vote getters - in the race for governor. A bunch of Republicans split the GOP vote. The top two - Bernadette Wilson got 16,456 votes (10%) and David Bronson got 13,349 (8%). With Begich out, that left Republican Treg Taylor move up to the fourth spot (and the general election ballot.) But he was disqualified for not filling in the financial disclosure info when he signed up to be a candidate. Then his Lt. Gov candidate moved up to be the governor candidate and chose Treg Taylor's wife to be her running mate. Though she may have the same disclosure problems her husband has.
I'm hearing complaints from people I know, and I feel it myself, that these politicians don't trust Alaskan voters to rank the candidates.
They don't trust the voters to rank their preferred Democrat first and the other one second.
With two strong Democrats running for governor, it was a chance to demonstrate how RCV should work. Each should have strongly told their supporters to vote for them first and the other Democrat second. Emphasized that they were very similar on policy issues. This would have been especially important this year because we also vote on whether to end RCV (and I feel compelled to always point out we would also end open primaries and disclosure of those who give dark money. And other things are in there, like having Governor and Lt. Governor run separately, not as a team.)
Tom Begich sent a letter out to supporters that justified getting out of the race as a matter of money:
"At a time when so many Alaskans are already stretched thin, we cannot keep asking them to give more and more just to compete with much larger amounts of money flowing into politics in Alaska. Continuing through November would require millions more, and we believe that the strongest path to victory is to bring Democratic voters, donors and resources together behind one candidate.
Before we made this decision, I spoke directly with Jonathan about the priorities at the heart of our campaign and the promises we made to Alaskans.
We share a commitment to strong public schools, affordable energy, housing and health care, and making sure Alaska receives its fair share from our resources."
But it's clear both parties are wary of having more than one candidate from their party running for the same office. The Republicans did everything they could to push the candidacies of marginal Democratic candidates onto the US Senate race. At this point that seems to have failed. Right now we have Peltola (the Democrat who got 49.5% of the vote in the primary) and three Republicans - the current US Senator Dan S. Sullivan, Daniel J. Sullivan, and Jerry Heikes. [I'd note that today the Anchorage Daily News said that Democrat David Leslie has dropped out of the race under pressure from Democrats, and that Jerry Heikes, listed as a Republican, has moved up to the fourth spot.]
And right now, there is one Democrat and three Republicans running for Governor. (The deadline to drop out has passed, but there are questions about Jodi Taylor's financial disclosure which is pretty much the same as her husband's was.)
I'd also note that Candi English (Treg Taylor's running mate) moving up as a governor candidate raises new questions. She's been relatively invisible and it seems odd for her to leapfrog over other candidates onto the general ballot.
There is no perfect system. Whatever system you have, people figure out ways to game the system. Ideally, we will not get rid of Ranked Choice Voting in November and we can learn how to make it work.
As I looked back on the 2024 US House race, there were four candidates:
- Mary Peltola
- Nick Begich
- Eric Hafner (who was then and is now a prisoner in a New York prison and labeled as a Democrat)
- John Wayne Howe (Alaska Independence Party)
This is a disparate group of candidates. You can't judge RCV based on whether voters in this race chose to use more than one vote or not. Why would a serious voter cast a vote for someone in prison across the country? Possibly as protest. But then why cast a second vote?
Peltola voters have no reason to cast a second vote. What would be the point?
But, in fact, people did cast second votes. The first person eliminated was Eric Hafner.
The charts come from the Alaska Division of Elections page here.
John Wayne Howe got 13,871 votes and 7541 of his voters (or 54%) ranked someone second.
Given that Eric Hafner and John Wayne Howe voters were probably disaffected voters who chose a) a New York prisoner and b) and Alaska Independence Party candidate as their first choice, these seem like fairly high percentages of voters using RCV.
If there were two strong candidates from the same party with very similar policy positions on the general ballot, I'd guess there would be a higher percentage of second place votes. It's true that the first time around (2022), Sarah Palin and Nick Begich (both Republicans) attacked each other instead of working together. In 2024 the second place 'name' Republican, Nancy Dahlstrom, dropped out rather than run against Nick Begich.
But we won't see two such candidates from the Democratic side in state wide office elections this year. We will see that with Republicans in the Governor's race, but not really in the US Senate race. There we have one Democrat (Peltola), one main Republican (Sen, Sullivan), and two lesser Republicans. The three Republicans are not likely to cooperate and tell the voters to rank the other two Republicans.
The US House race was the only statewide election in 2024 except for the presidential election. I'm guessing the presidential election could have been RCV, but in any case Trump won a majority so if it was RCV, there was no need to go to the RCV round,
My biggest concern here is that the politicians aren't going to let us actually use ranked choice voting because if they have two main candidates competing, they'll pull the one with fewer votes out. The three Republicans on the ballot for governor are an exception to trend I'm calling out here. Let's see if they cooperate and tell voters to give their second and third place votes the other Republicans.
[This is not as succinct (or probably as clear) as I wanted this to be, but I need to move on.]
