Alaska voters cast ballots in special House election in state’s first ranked choice contest

Alaska voters on Tuesday completed an experiment that has drawn national attention – a ranked choice election for the person who will fill out the U.S. House term of the late Don Young.

The special election to choose the person who will fill the remaining four months of Young’s term came down to three candidates listed on one side of the ballots due Tuesday evening.

While one side of the ballot listed candidates running in the normal “pick-one” primary, now an open and nonpartisan contest, the flip side offered voters the chance to rank up to four candidates.

Former Gov. Sarah Palin and businessman Nick Begich were the Republicans listed, and former legislator Mary Peltola was the lone Democrat listed. Independent Al Gross would have been among the four, but he dropped out of the race. The ballot did include a space for a write-in candidate, where Inupiat leader Tara Sweeney, was hoping voters would fill in her name.

The ranked choice system narrowly approved by voters in 2020 has sparked some fierce debate outside of Alaska.

There are plenty of fans.

“Alaska’s `Final Four’ voting can be a model for the nation,” reads the headline of a guest column penned by representatives of a ranked choice-promoting business group that ran Monday in the political publication The Hill.

“This is how we free ourselves to have our leaders answer to us rather than the extremes and insiders,” former presidential candidate Andrew Yang said in a June 28 Tweet.

And there are many foes, perhaps most prominent of which is former President Donald Trump. He blasted the new system when he came to Anchorage to campaign for Palin and for Kelly Tshibaka, a challenger to Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

“It’s a total rigged deal,” he said during his July 9 rally for his endorsed candidates.

Also opposed is the Alaska Policy Forum, a conservative organization.  The new system “makes a joke of Alaska politics,” said the headline a guest column in the Wall Street Journal written by Sarah Montalbano, a research associate with the group.

Voters casting ballots in Anchorage on Tuesday, whatever their views on ranked choice voting, seemed to be taking the change in stride.

Sharon Gilbert, who voted at Spring Hill Elementary School in South Anchorage, said she ranked all three names on that side of the ballot.

“I’d like the person I voted No. 3 to know I ranked third for her,” Gilbert said. That was Palin, she said. “I want her to know she was third in my world.”

Palin was “way down the line in mine,” chimed in Laurel Gregory, who was with Gilbert at the polling place. Gregory said she ranked the other two candidates, though she did not disclose the order of her ranking.

The ranked choice system “was pretty simple,” she said. “It’s fine with me.”

Judith White, voting at Rogers Park Elementary School in Midtown Anchorage, said she ranked Begich first and Palin second – even though she dislikes the system.

“It’s certainly easy enough to do. But I think it’s a very bad idea,” she said. “I think, also, it’s unconstitutional, because I think state legislatures are supposed to set the rules.”

Some voters rejected ranking candidates. Anchorage resident William Geest said Sarah Palin was the only candidate who he supported.

“I don’t think that’s the way it should be done,” Geest said of the new system. “I like old-style voting.”

Geest said he’d like the state to return to the previous system.

Jerry Ward, a former state legislator and Palin campaign adviser, declined to pass judgment on the new system.

“It’s the law of the land,” he said, sitting in Palin’s campaign office in South Anchorage.

What may be annoying, he said, will be the long wait to calculate the results under the new system. “Now we’re going to wait till next month to find out who won,” he said.

The Alaska Division of Elections has put a lot of effort into educating voters about the new system, said public relations manager Tiffany Montemayor.  Along with mass mailings, there were mock elections that allowed Alaskans to practice the system conducted both by the division, as well as efforts by other organizations.

“We’ve done a lot of educational things, and I think they were all successful in different ways because they all reached different communities,” Montemayor said.

One of the most famous was an online 2021 contest organized by the division that allowed voters to select their favorite Alaska seafood. In early results, the lowly pollock appeared to be leading, but ultimately king crab was the winner.

Another successful effort, Montemayor said, was the division’s youth art contest, in which a ranked-choice voting system was used to select designs for voter information pamphlets and voting stickers. There were close to 200 entries in all, she said.

Even before the first votes in the U.S. House race were counted on Tuesday, candidates for other offices were preparing for their own ranked choice elections in November.

Amid Monday afternoon rush-hour traffic, gubernatorial candidates Les Gara and Bill Walker shared the Midtown Anchorage corner most favored for sign-waving. Gara, a former state legislator, and Walker, a former governor, are vying for much of the same center-left slide of the electorate, and both said positive things Monday about the ranked-choice system.

Walker, an independent, said he is a big fan.

“More choice is better,” he said, in between waving at passing motorists. “It kind of levels the playing field a little bit. It takes control away from the party, which is not a bad thing. Of course, I’m non-party, so that’s what I would say.”

Gara, a Democrat, admitted that he had mixed feelings about the new system and that he voted against the ballot initiative that created it. But he said it presents some important advantages.

“I think the good thing about it is it lets you vote your conscience. You don’t have to do math and say, ‘Who’s got the best chance?’ You just vote your conscience, first, second, third, fourth,” he said.

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