When far-right Homer Republican Rep. Sarah Vance introduced her legislation to repeal ranked-choice voting at Tuesday’s meeting of the House State Affairs Committee, she told the committee that repealing the system was more important to her constituents than school funding or even the size of the dividend.
“I’m here to fulfill the will of Alaskans,” she said.
The subsequent public testimony suggested otherwise.
At a 3:1 ratio, Alaskans testified against the legislation, arguing that they liked the system and were satisfied with how the 2022 elections turned out. Several people told the committee that the results—which generally favored centrists—better represented Alaska’s politics.
The legislation would undo much of the election reforms passed via voter initiative in 2020. That measure brought open primaries where the top four vote-getters proceeded to the general election regardless of political party. The general election was conducted with ranked-choice voting, allowing voters to rank candidates according to preference if no one achieved an outright majority in the first round. The new system made for several races in 2022 where the leading candidates came from the same political party, and in most cases, the centrist candidates prevailed.
Several testifiers argued the shift toward the center was the real reason Vance, one of the Legislature’s most conservative members, and others are pushing for the repeal. Meanwhile, far-right GOP Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka is backing an initiative to repeal the system after losing to moderate U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
“House Bill 4 seeks to recant the will of the people in favor of discontents in and out of power,” said Anchorage resident Jan Carolyn Hardy. “House Bill 4 has been introduced to appease the discontents who did not win the most recent state and federal elections and those who are fearful that ranked-choice voting will lift the thumb on ‘free and fair elections.’”
She pointed out that “free and fair elections” was said with sneer quotes, arguing that the semi-closed partisan primaries of the past skewed politics to the extremes. In the past, the flavor of representation of heavily conservative or progressive legislative districts was essentially determined at the primary stage rather than by the entire district.
Several testifiers told the committee that the 2022 elections felt like the first time they could have their voice heard in the political process rather than just voting for the least-bad candidate with a shot of beating the candidate they opposed.
“It’s the first time that I felt my opinions really count,” Juneau resident Mukhya Khalsa told the committee. “When I have to calculate whether I should vote for the person who most closely resembles my ideas for governance versus one that I feel is electable, I feel like I’m sending the wrong message to the elected people. Ranked choice voting lets me vote for who I want as well as someone who I think can win, and it makes me very happy.”
About a quarter of the testimony favored the repeal of ranked-choice voting. Much of it revolved around conservative talking points about low voter turnout (it was low nationwide) and general confusion about the system. There was also a dash of conservative conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines, a favorite target of former President Donald Trump in claiming the 2020 election was “stolen,” and U.S. Sen. Murkowski, a favorite target of Trump. One caller testified that her husband was so disgusted with ranked-choice voting that he didn’t vote in the Anchorage municipal elections (which are conducted with traditional first-past-the-post voting and not ranked-choice voting).
The testimony on Tuesday ran up against the committee’s time limit with somewhere in the neighborhood of another 30-50 people that were signed up to testify via phone. However, committee Chair Rep. Laddie Shaw promised that a follow-up hearing on the legislation would be held later, noting that the committee wasn’t in any hurry to push the bill through.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.
