Alaskan Pols Don't Seem To Believe In Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) [UPDATED]

[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 withdrawn 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 to 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.)    [UPDATE 9/9/2026:  Treg Taylor is back on the ballot on orders apparently from the Lt. Governor's (the same Nancy Dahlstrom from 2024) superiors because, they say, lots of people have left things blank and not been disqualified.]

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.

Hafner got 3558 votes.  The Hafner voters gave 267 to Nick Begich, 661 to John Wayne Howe, and 1313 to Mary Peltola.  That totals 2214 second place votes transferred to other candidates.  62% of the people who voted for Hafner ranked a second candidate.  That seems to be a fair number.  (I understand exhausted on the chart to mean that there wasn't a second choice vote.  Overvotes, I think means they marked more than one person for the same ranking.  [I called the Division of Elections in Anchorage to check.  They referred me to the main office in Juneau.  The guy who answered the phone had to go ask someone else.  But eventually he confirmed that my guesses were correct.  I also asked about the Fraction column and he had to go ask again.  Apparently for some jurisdictions the votes can be divided into fractions, but Alaska doesn't do that so these are whole votes, or 1.]

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. But the 2024 numbers suggest that the most voters will rank a second choice. 

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 the  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.]

Primary Election Day Tomorrow in Alaska and Prediction Markets

 Hard to believe it's finally here.  We didn't get any campaign literature in the mail today!!!

Probably the most uncertainty centers around the Governor's race.  There are lots of known candidates.  Which of the Republicans will end up in the top four?  And will other Republicans drop out in the belief that being on the ballot could siphon off votes from the top Republican and help the top Democrat.  Will the second Democrat, if there is one, also drop out?  

Ranked Choice Tabulation Questions

Given that we have Ranked Choice Voting, voters can rank all four candidates - first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice. If a candidate gets 50%+1 vote in the first round that candidate wins.   If no one gets over 50%, the candidate with the fewest first place votes is dropped and that candidate's second place votes are distributed to the other candidates.

DOE_Tabulation_60sec_HULU.mp4  Link to the video explaining how they count ranked choice voting from the Division of Elections.  Couldn't find a way to embed the video here.  [I did look, and it can be done, but I didn't find instructions I could use.)

I have questions about tabulating the votes, but tomorrow is election day and I'm not going to try to get answers from the Division of Elections until after the election. 

The video doesn't explain how, if ever, the third and fourth choice votes would count.  Perhaps if someone's choice for a second place vote has already been eliminated, the third place vote would count.  (I couldn't find anything that actually says that.)  And with only four candidates in the general, I don't think you would ever get to the fourth choice vote.  

Also, what if someone got no first place votes, but was the second place choice for all the other candidates?  That person would be eliminated on the first round and would never get the second place votes.  It's not a likely scenario, but something like that could happen.  

Ranked Choice Strategy Questions

In 2022, Sarah Palin and Nick Begich split the Republican vote in the general and enough second place votes gave Peltola the win.  

In 2024, two Republicans pulled out of the general, presumably because they didn't want to do the same thing, and Nick Begich beat Peltola.  But that year Trump was also on the ballot and that brought out lots of Republican voters.  (Total votes for US House:  2024 = 329,493;  2022=263,610) 

Ranked Choice Voting is supposed to overcome this sort of problem by giving voters the option to make second and third choice votes.  But not enough voters have done that.  Will they learn to do that in the future?  Are there good strategic reasons not to rank?  What are they?  Will there be candidates who urge their voters to choose Candidate B as their second choice?

The Spoiler Candidates and the Spoiler PAC Campaigns

My previous post was about Outside [Alaska lingo for outside of Alaska] PACs spending lots of money on fringe candidates - one from Arizona, one from South Dakota, and one Alaskan - in an attempt to get them onto the final four in the general.  

One of those candidates - Richard Grayson - has said he would withdraw if he were in the final four.  Today Grayson emailed me a link to a review of what the prediction markets are saying about the Alaska US Senate race.  There's a lot more discussion at the link, but here's the gist:

That's hard to read 

That was too small, and now it's too big, but the chart is in the link.  I've also looked at the Kalshi page on this race and it's clear I need to learn a lot more about prediction markets and what everything means.  I do suspect that a lot of people who are betting are not from Alaska and don't really know that much about our elections.  But I don't really know.  

The prediction markets didn't do that well in Michigan and Wisconsin.

In comparison, on June 23, 2026  I wrote:

"At this point, I''d guess that Peltola, Sen. Sullivan, and Kohlhaas* would be the top three, scooping up most of the votes.  As I look at the 2024 House race, the others won't get many votes.  Though I suspect Dustin Darden has run often enough that people will vote for him because they recognize his name.  And Daniel J. probably has a good chance to get votes too, for the very reasons the Sen. Sullivan campaign and the Republican Party of Alaska and the National Party want him off the ticket.  It would be between him and Darden for fourth place.  

Given that early polls show Peltola ahead of Sen. Sullivan, having Daniel J. on the November ballot would be a threat to Sen. Sullivan's reelection.  If Daniel J. made it to the general election, and there he pulled 5% of the vote from the Senator, it could easily be enough to give Peltola the victory.  Some might say that Peltola's ahead now, so she'd win either way.  I think that's counting your chicks before the eggs are laid.  

[*I'd mentioned Kohlhaas in an earlier paragraph as another candidate (Alaska Libertarian Party) who had run often enough that people knew his name."]

Tomorrow evening, and surely by Wednesday, we'll know.   

[This post has more of a deadline than most, so I'm going to post now without proofing as much as I normally would.  If I find typos etc., I'll fix them.  I won't change content, but if I do, like always,  I'll make it clear what I did.]

Ranked Choice Voting Back On Nov Ballot/Nancy Dahlstrom Drops Out of US House Race

 Let's see if I can write a quick, short post.  

1.  The Alaska Supreme Court approved a lower court ruling putting a ballot measure to repeal Ranked Choice Voting after there were a number of challenges to how the group operated.  I didn't read the court case [I went back and looked and it's very short and says, 

"An opinion explaining this decision will be issued at a later date."

but the Anchorage Daily News reported today that a) they have traditionally decided in favor of putting measures on the ballot and b) the technical issue (a notary's license had expired) wasn't the fault of the petitioners and so getting a signature booklet notarized again, after the deadline, was acceptable.  There were other irregularities for which the petitioners got a hefty fine (like hiding funding sources by forming a 'church' in Washington State) but in the end, it will be on the ballot.  

2.  The anti ranked choice voting push is coming from the die-hard Republicans of Alaska.  They keep talking about it hurting them.  In one sense, they are right.  The change to ranked choice voting includes getting rid of closed primaries.  In closed primaries the more extreme and partisan Republican candidates tend to get elected.  Open primaries combined with ranked choice voting dilutes the partisanship because more than die-hard Republicans vote in the open primary.  But, ranked choice voting means that if there are several people from the same party in the final four from the primary, they don't have to split the vote and lose to a Democrat.  They just have to it cooperate and get Republicans to rank other Republican candidates second and even third.  If they only vote for one candidate, they aren't helping the party to get the most out of ranked choice voting.  

But they can't quite seem to take advantage of it.  Last time round (2022, the first time we used ranked choice voting) lots of voters chose one of the two top Republicans first and then either did not rank anyone else or chose the Democratic candidate.   

3.  Today, we also learned that Republican candidate Nancy Dahlstrom, who came in third behind Democratic incumbent Mary Peltola and Republican challenger Nick Begich III, dropped out of the race.  Begich had pledged to drop out if he wasn't the top GOP candidate, but Dahlstrom hadn't made such a pledge.  But she got A LOT of comments on Twitter yesterday telling her to drop out.  Will it matter?  She could have just told her voters to vote for Begich as their second choice.  

Rather than take advantage of ranked choice voting by cooperating on ranking, they've pushed Dahlstrom out altogether.  

4.  But the Democratic incumbent got just over 50% of the initial primary vote.  The turnout was very low.  Only 16% of voters participated.  This does not count the people who voted by mail though, and the numbers will go up somewhat and that 50% might change.  But that's a formidable lead.  And there were 12 total candidates.  If a candidate drops out, the next highest candidate moves up to the fourth spot on the ballot.  

Also, this primary was not a high interest election.  Voters had only the Congressional race, which with ranked choice voting, wasn't going to eliminate the top Democratic or Republican choices, plus a state house race in each district.  And one third of the districts had Senate races.  [It's supposed to be 1/3 of the senate get voted on each election, but right after redistricting, the first election may have more.  (I just went back and checked - there were ten senate races, which is 1/2 of the senators.)] 

Unfortunately, I suspect most voters don't really know much about their state house and senate candidates.  I was surprised Tuesday at how long some people spent in the voting booths to vote for three races. (I was a poll worker so I could see that.) 

But I think there will be a lot more interest when the presidential candidates are on the ballot in November.  The US House race will essentially be a two person race.  Dahlstrom, the third place candidate had 20% of the vote.  The fourth place candidate, Matt Salisbury, had .60% (that's less than one per cent) as of the Tuesday night tally.  With Dahlstrom dropping out, there will be room for the next highest vote getter, John Wayne Howe, the Alaska Independent Party candidate who got .57% of the vote.  

I suspect a lot of voters who absolutely don't want Trump will put Peltola (the Democrat) first or second, but will skip the strongly anti-abortion Begich as a second choice.  

5.  Ranked choice voting was approved in 2020 by a slim majority by voters.  But I think Alaskans got to see how easy and sensible it was in 2022 (I was a poll worker and got to hear from voters as they brought their filled out ballots to the voting machine).  I did have one voter on Tuesday (I worked at the polls again in the primary) who was vehemently opposed to ranked choice voting.  "It's unconstitutional.  It's one man one vote, not four votes."  But I'm guessing he doesn't represent most Alaskan voters, who, I believe will endorse it more strongly this time.  

Also, the national organizations supporting ranked choice voting are putting a fair amount of money up to make sure it stays in Alaska.  (See the ADN article linked above)

Poll Working - And Peltola Does Well

 Yesterday was primary election day in Anchorage.  It was a beautiful sunny day and I biked over to Kasuun Elementary school (and passed the 1200 km mark for the summer so far). 

It was basically unremarkable.  People came, showed ID, got their ballots, voted in a voting booth, then brought the ballot to the voting machine where it was scanned.

None of the ballots were rejected by the scanner. (In 2022, the first time we had ranked choice voting, the machine did reject some of the ballots.  But the screen explained why - usually the person had voted for more than one person with the same ranking.)  

But this election was simple.  One US Congress seat.  One state house seat.  And in some districts there was also a state senate seat.  

After the ballot was scanned, voters got a choice of Alaska themed "I Voted" stickers.  

I did notice that the scanner was touchy.  Most people had a bit of trouble getting the scanner to suck in their ballot.  I'm not sure what the people who got it scanned in right away did differently from the others.  

But I did discover, toward the end, that if voters turned the privacy sleeve (with the ballot inside) upside down, then took the blank side of the ballot out of the sleeve and put it into the slot on the scanner, it went in with no problem.  (They scan from either end of the ballot, whatever side is up.)  Because the ballot choices were so few, the backside of the ballot was blank.  So no one's votes were visible. That won't be the case in November.  

There were also four first time voters I got to congratulate - three young men and a young woman.  Maybe there were more, but I wasn't aware.  Okay, some will ask how I was aware, so here's how.  The first two were very young looking and I just asked, "You're not a first time voter are you?"and they smiled and said yes.  The parents of the other two alerted me.  

On the negative side, the turnout was really low.  Not sure exactly what the percentage was, but we had over 2000 registered voters on the list and when we finished the scanner said that 294 had voted.  If we round it off to 2000 total (and there were more than that) 200 votes would be 10%.  300 votes would be 15%.  But then I don't know how many people voted by mail.  That's easy to do.  At least four people dropped off their mail in ballots, which go in the box with the questioned ballots and don't get scanned.  

Actually, I can figure this out more precisely.  I looked up the Division of Elections page for House District 12.  

My estimate wasn't pretty close.  I said 300 would have been 15% if there were 2000 voters.  There were 2174 registered voters and the turnout was 13.53%.  Not an impressive number.  The chart also lists 117 Absentee voters and 438 early voters.  But that's for the entire district, not just the one precinct. I would have thought there were more.

I'd also note that when I left there was a discrepancy in the numbers.  The number of voters listed on the rolls (they are highlighted in yellow and sign their name) was 293.  And when the counted all the questioned and special needs ballots and the checked the ballot stubs, minus the spoiled ballots, that came out to 293 as well.  I'd helped take down the voting booths and putting away other things and since I was biking, I wanted to take off and asked if I was needed further and so I left without finding out how the discrepancy was resolved.  But these counting issues come up every year and the training program spent a fair amount of time on this. 

The whole house district voted for the NON incumbent, with a 14.11% voter turnout.  I assume that NON refers to non-partisan.  The Division of Elections page on parties lists N as non-partisan.  Schrage has been part of the House Coalition comprised of Democrats and most Republicans.

The whole Senate district gave the Democratic incumbent a plurality.   

And of more interest, I assume, to non-Alaskan readers, voters gave Democratic US House of Representatives member Mary Peltola 50.38% of the vote in a 12 way race!  The two major Republican vote getters were Alaska Republican Party endorsed candidate Nick Begich with 26.98%, and Trump and major Congressional Republicans supported candidate Nancy Dahlstrom with 20.01%.  

Remember, this is an open (all candidates together) primary and the four top candidates go on to the general election which will be ranked-choice.

The turnout in the Congressional race was also low - 15%.  As impressive as winning a majority in a 12 person race with two well supported  Republicans, the general election, being a presidential election, will have a lot more voters.  While she may not win a majority in the first round, Peltola is in a good position to win enough second place votes to pull 

Nick Begich had promised to drop out if he was in third place behind Dahlstrom.  Dahlstrom made no such commitment.  

In 2022, many who voted for the top Republicans as their first choice vote, gave Democrat Peltola their second place vote.  Not another Republican. I would say this is a good sign for the Democratic House elections.  

One final note - House District 18, which includes two military bases, had less than 5% turnout.  Ouch.  

Did Ranked Choice Voting Cost Palin The Election?

After the election results for Alaska's ranked choice voting election to fill the remainder of US Rep Don Young, Sarah Palin blamed her loss to Mary Peltola on Ranked Choice Voting.  

“Ranked-choice voting was sold as the way to make elections better reflect the will of the people. As Alaska – and America – now sees, the exact opposite is true. The people of Alaska do not want the destructive democrat agenda to rule our land and our lives, but that’s what resulted from someone’s experiment with this new crazy, convoluted, confusing ranked-choice voting system. It’s effectively disenfranchised 60% of Alaska voters."  [From her campaign website.]

The quick answer to the title question is "No".  

Below (way below) is a video discussing this question.  I don't know who these people are - it looks like it's a podcast from The Hill.   (Biasly rates The Hill "moderate" with an ever so slight lean to the right.)  But they do more or less reflect my sense of Ranked Choice Voting.  

What they don't discuss is how getting rid of the closed Republican primary - having an open primary with all candidates and picking the top four to be in the final Ranked Choice general election.  

A closed Republican primary would have probably led to a Palin victory and two major candidates - one Republican and one Democrat (Palin and Peltola) running in the general election, with some minor third party candidates.  

Would Peltola have been able to defeat Palin in that sort of general election?  We won't know.  But we do know that half of Begich's second votes went to either Peltola or no one.  Here's what it looked like on the Alaska Elections website:

click on images to enlarge

So it could well be that Peltola may have pulled out the victory under the old system.  Lots of Alaska remember how Palin quit being governor after only finishing part of the term.  Many also remember the issues with the Palin's oldest son over slashing school bus tires and opening his senior year in Michigan, and the giant brawl involving the Palin family and a Wasilla party.  

And long time Alaska Republicans remember how she publicly called out the GOP Party Chair for having a conflict of interest as a member of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission while, as GOP chair, soliciting donations from the oil companies the commission regulated.  

The benefit of Ranked Choice Voting, as they say in the video, is that you can vote for candidates that aren't likely to win without throwing away your vote, because you pick the one you like the most and then the next one, and if you like, the ones after that.  If you first choice loses, your second choice candidate (gets your vote instead.)

The Republicans - Begich and Palin - fought with each other in this campaign.  Ranked Choice Voting with an open primary means you can't alienate too many voters and it, theoretically, eliminates the extreme candidates who would win in a closed primary.  

There's also an interesting NYTimes article on this for those who can get past the paywall.  It looks at how Alaska got ranked choice voting and highlights Katherine Gehl who has devoted herself to the idea.  It mentions that an initiative in Missouri didn't get enough votes, but one in Nevada this year did.  Also interesting the Marc Elias who has been fighting hard with lawsuits against GOP attempts to deny that Biden won the election, worked hard against the Ranked Choice Initiative in Nevada.  Elias is a smart guy so I need to understand his opposition better. 

Also, a reminder for non-Alaskans, August 16 was also the primary election for the actual (not just the remaining months of Young's seat) Alaska House race.  Here's a list of the candidates, their vote tallies, and red marks the four top candidate who go on to the general election in November.

Tara Sweeney is both a Republican AND an Alaska Native Woman.  She is more aligned with oil interests.  I suspect that Alaska Natives will give Peltola their second vote if they vote first for Sweeney.  Will the Republicans come up with a more cooperative strategy and direct their voters to cast their next votes for the other Republicans?  Will it matter?  

Peltola has now gotten much more name recognition and more people have seen her.  She's so much more humble than the two candidates she beat in the Special Election, and unlike Palin, she speaks in whole sentences and in a calm tone.  Unless someone gets 50% + one vote on the first ballot, we won't know for two weeks, when all the ballots are in.  But if someone gets 48% in the first round and the others are much further back, that should be a good indicator too.