Dark Money Funding Rank Choice Voting Initiatives in 8 States

READ MORE: Three important things to know about Rank Choice Voting. It's funded by dark money from leftwing multi-billionaires. The way ballots are counted is a black box where you can't really prove this person was left with the most votes. Voters who only want to vote for one candidate will have their ballots trashed in the second, third, and subsequent rounds.

If you’re confused by how ranked-choice voting (RCV) works, confusion’s the point.

When Americans vote, they’re used to choosing one candidate for a single office from a pool of two or three. Under RCV rules (sometimes called “final four/five” or instant runoff), voters are tasked with ranking as many as 5 candidates for one office from their most- to least-preferred. In other words, RCV forces voters to vote for every candidate—including those from parties they don’t wish to support.

RCV advocates point out that political parties, including the Republican Party, often use RCV for their primary or convention ballots. But these are partisan, internal votes where having a second-choice backup vote makes sense for voters determining which nominee will represent their party in the general election. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, for instance, won the ranked-choice nomination battle at the Virginia GOP’s 2021 convention. In Youngkin’s case, however, he would’ve won the most votes under a traditional system anyway; RCV had the same outcome.

That system becomes hairy when applied to general elections, where most Americans vote straight-ticket for either the Democrats or Republicans. Under RCV rules, if they don’t vote for every candidate for a single office from 1 to 5, they risk having their ballots trashed. Tabulators run the results through a series of rounds where the lowest vote-getter is dropped, then the next-lowest, and so on until a final winner emerges. If that loser happens to be your first choice—and you didn’t vote for a second- or third-choice candidate—your ballot will be trashed and your vote discarded.

Being disenfranchised by byzantine voting rules is the fastest way to discourage Americans—who already doubt their votes really matter—from ever voting again.

Nor are the outcomes necessarily predictable, which can make them untrustworthy. Election upsets happen. Yet in most races voters can guess which candidate will win. Theoretically, under RCV the ultimate winner is the first-, second-, or third-choice of most voters, advocates argue, creating consensus. In practice, the tabulation software used to calculate the winner under RCV rules is ill-understood and effectively a black box: Ballots go in and a winner emerges, sometimes an underdog who got well below 51 percent of the vote.

Say there are 3 candidates for Alaska’s sole congressional seat, 2 Republicans and one Democrat. Everyone expects a Republican victory in this ultra-conservative state. The state’s RCV law requires voters to fill in the bubbles for all 3 individuals. But many Republicans end up choosing one of the GOP candidates as their favorite and not voting for the other Republican or the Democrat.

The result is that when all votes are counted, their ballots are discarded in the second round of counting—and the Democrat emerges the unlikely victor.

That’s exactly the scenario that happened in Alaska’s 2022 election, when more voters cast a ballot for Republicans but the lone Democrat, Mary Peltola, won because the Republican candidates split their votes. So ruby red Alaska, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964, was conquered by ranked-choice voting… bought and paid for by out-of-state special interests from Washington, D.C. and Colorado.
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