Will Alaska provide a model election system for America?
Alaska is a place both physically and psychically removed from the rest of America, which folks there refer to as “Outside.”
Note the capital “O,” as it appears in newspapers, which reflects both standardization and a proud embrace of the state’s apartness.
Alaska has changed its elections in way that may be a model for the rest of the country as the U.S. sinks ever lower into a slough of political nihilism and dysfunction.
Starting this year, candidates will run in a system that starts by placing all of them on the same ballot, regardless of party. Then the top four votegetters advance to the general election, at which voters will rank them in order of preference.
The idea is to reward candidates who show broad appeal and to undermine the hard-liners on both sides, resulting — in theory — in lawmakers more willing to get stuff done and leave the noxious political antics to the noisemakers on cable news and talk radio and the rabble on social media.
Jason Grenn helped promote the ballot initiative after serving a term as an independent in Alaska’s House of Representatives.
What’s unique is Alaska’s top-four system, combined with ranked-choice voting. Four slots are preferable, Grenn said, to give independent and thirdparty contestants a better shot at advancing and to further motivate candidates to reach out to different kinds of voters.
“When candidates compete not just against one another but also to become the second choice of those voting first for an opponent, it creates incentives for collaboration and consensus you don’t find in a top-two system,” Grenn said.
Under Alaska’s system, a candidate who wins more than 50% support is elected outright. But if no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, a new round of tabulation begins.
The candidate with the poorest showing is eliminated and those votes are reallocated to supporters’ second pick. The process continues until someone receives a majority of votes.
Ranked-choice voting (which, incidentally, is how the Oscars work) is used statewide in Maine and more than 50 other jurisdictions across the country, including New York City, San Francisco, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
New York City, which used ranked-choice voting for the first time in last year’s mayoral race, saw turnout rise by 13%.
A study of four Bay Area cities that have adopted the system since 2000 — San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro — found an increase in the percentage of candidates of color seeking office, as well as an increased probability of female candidates and female candidates of color being elected.
Can ranked-choice voting also lessen polarization and reduce the number of crazies — think Reps. Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene — elected to office, as supporters in Alaska hope?
Benjamin Reilly, a political scientist and rankedchoice voting expert at the University of Western Australia, offers an emphatic yes. (Australia has used the system for more than 100 years.)
“You just cannot get elected as an extremist,” Reilly said. “It’s very difficult for you to be a real hard-liner and scorchedearth candidate and alienate the supporters of every other candidate … because you often may need some of the second-choice rankings” to win election.
There are, he said, downsides.
Some believe Australia’s politics are too geared toward the center, “too Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” as Reilly put it. And ranked-choice voting requires a good deal more thoughtfulness and engagement on the part of voters who must consider not just their first choice but second (and, in Alaska, third and fourth) preference. But, that doesn’t seem like much to ask to improve our blighted political system.