State primary election ballot isn't complicated, but it requires some education

I voted Tuesday afternoon at the state office building in downtown Fairbanks for the primary election and the special general election. There are a lot of names on the ballot, but this isn’t hard or confusing.

Armed with this expertise, I am scheduled to give a presentation Wednesday at 7 p.m. on “Ranked Choice Voting: Will it Work for Alaska?” at 7 p.m. in the BP Design Theater, Room 401. The theater is in the new Joe Usibelli Engineering Building.

If you can’t make it in person, a link to the livestream presentation will be at the UAF Summer Sessions site.

Spoiler alert: I’m not sure how the ranked choice voting system will work in Alaska. The process will make the path to victory for candidates far less direct than in the past. It will force candidates to try to appeal to broader audiences. Candidates who refuse to reach out beyond their sliver of society will be harmed by this system.

I plan to get into several topics and hope for a lively discussion about the idea that the new system will lead to the election of more moderate candidates and arguments and whether voting for a single candidate makes sense, depending upon the field.

The new process is not the nightmare that some people claim and there are elements of the new system that are a clear improvement on the past.

The Wall Street Journal featured a overwrought column by a summer intern from Wasilla headlined, “Ranked-choice voting makes a joke of Alaska politics.” Nothing in the column backs up that headline.

Columnist Sarah Montalbano complained that her father “threw away his primary ballot after voting in every election for decades,” apparently because of the lengthy ballot issued for the U.S. House primary a couple of months ago. That reveals a lot about her father and nothing about the election process.

Just because the results are harder to predict in advance, that doesn’t mean this approach is flawed. It will change what you have to do to win.

If there are more candidates than in the past, that is because the power of small groups in political parties to make all the advance decisions has been wiped out. That’s a good thing. A lot of the candidates who filed for Congress were not serious and did not campaign.

Like any institutional change, the ranked choice voting system requires voter education and study.

When I proposed this title for my talk many months ago, I thought that perhaps we’d be entirely within the primary stage, where voters are asked to choose one candidate in each contest.

But that was before the death of Rep. Don Young and the process to find a replacement for the rest of his term.

My advice is to look up a sample ballot before you go to the polls, to understand your options. Make sure you have the right ballot for your district. Here is a link to the sample ballots.

The Division of Elections has done a good job in making the primary election and the special general election understandable on the ballots. The primary election is on one side of the ballot, while the special general election is on the other.

Vote for one candidate in each race in the primary. The flip side of the ballot—which contains the special general election for the U.S. House—allows you to rank the three candidates in whatever order you choose.

They are Sarah Palin, Nick Begich and Mary Peltola. There is a space for write-ins, but write-in votes will not be counted unless candidates register as write-in candidates with the state Division of Elections.

One of the big questions is when it makes sense to rank candidates and when it does not.

The best analysis I’ve read so far on the situation is this one from Jeannette Lee, an Alaska researcher who works for the Sightline Institute, a nonpartisan Northwest think tank.

Peltola is likely to gain about 40 percent of the vote, while Begich and Palin may total 60 percent between them. Either Begich or Palin is likely to finish third in the first round for the special general election.

‘Here’s where ranked choice voting kicks in. The voters who chose the Round 1 loser as their No. 1 and ranked another candidate second will remain in the game. In fact, their second-choice votes will decide the election. In this scenario, where Peltola advances to Round 2, her supporters’ second choices won’t ever come into play. With three candidates in the race, the election will end in Round 2,” Lee wrote.

“But if Peltola somehow loses in the first round, those of her supporters who failed to rank a second candidate will have forfeited a plum chance to influence the election. Ranking Peltola first and a Republican second would NOT allow the Republican to beat Peltola as long as she’s still in the race.”

“Again, Peltola supporters lose nothing by ranking a Republican second. But if she’s out in Round 1, they’ll have a say over who wins rather than letting other voters choose for them.”

In this race, it comes down to whether Peltola voters have a preference for Begich or Palin. Those who don’t may end up voting for her alone.

“Begich and Palin are in a dead heat for Round 1 votes, and they know it. Chances are only one of them will advance to the second round, no matter how you slice the roughly 60 percent of likely Republican voters in the Alaska electorate. The Republican who makes it to Round 2 has a very good chance of winning. Given the stakes, their campaigns have opted to attack each other, while winking at likely Peltola voters,” Lee said.

This election is a warm-up for the November election. Whoever wins the special general election seat will be in Congress for a few months, but that may not be a huge advantage.

The primary election ballot also includes the candidates for the full two-year term. Tara Sweeney is likely to be a serious competitor in the primary, setting up a real four-way contest in November.

Anyone with any thoughts about ranked choice voting, please share them here and I will try to address them in my presentation at UAF.