In case nobody is paying attention, we have the example of New York City’s (NYC’s) experience with ranked choice voting turning into a complete disaster.
Last week, NYC held their mayoral primary, where the parties select their mayoral candidate for the general election. On the democrat side, Borough President Eric Adams, a former NYPD officer held a decent lead that shrunk as more votes were counted. The problem is that NYC’s Board of Elections kept counting and counting and counting, his lead shrinking all the time.
All was going swimmingly until Adams charged election fraud as 135,000 more ballots were counted than people voted in the election. It turns out that the Board of Elections counted a set of test ballots as actual ballots cast for the candidates. The Board withdrew its earlier data reporting the first round of election results from their newly installed ranked choice voting system.
As of this writing, the Board of Elections after two weeks of trying to separate the test ballots from the real ones and starting the ranked choice process over once again, finally announced a winner in the democrat primary, one Eric Adams. Their next try to get it right will be Nov 2 when the actual election takes place.
This fiasco is a cautionary tale, a warning, and quite likely a preview of coming attractions for Alaska state primary elections next August and the General Election in November. Thanks to a well-funded (with dark, Outside dollars) ballot initiative that passed November 2020, Alaska now has a ranked choice election system in place for the foreseeable future. The campaign and passage of the rewrite of state election law was a bit of a bait and switch, with the campaign promising an end to so-called “Dark Money” (the bright shiny object held out in the campaign) while instituting ranked choice elections, the jungle primary, and intrusive limits on what political parties can and cannot do during elections.
Of course, this all required the AK Supreme Court throwing out half a century of their very own precedent allowing a ballot initiative with at least seven separate subjects on the ballot. Their excuse was that it was simply a rewrite of state election law. I wonder how they would rule on a ballot initiative that would put judges up for election every two years. If you think they would let such a thing anywhere near a ballot, I have a bridge to sell you.
NYC has demonstrated that ranked choice elections are both difficult to do properly and utterly opaque from the prying eyes of a highly skeptical electorate. And we here in Alaska are a mere 13 months away from trying it up here.
When disaster happens next August, I wonder what the election reform cheerleaders will have to say other than none of it is their fault?
Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
