Alaska Voters Stick With Ranked Choice Voting, Again

Alaska voters have rejected a ballot measure backed by President Donald Trump that would end ranked choice voting in the state, according to the Associated Press. The practice has long drawn the ire of the president and his party — with complaints reaching a fever pitch after a man sharing the name of Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan ran against him in the November midterms.

Saturday’s results mark the second consecutive general election in which voters have stuck by the system. Republican critics describe it as unnecessarily confusing; Trump has called it “disastrous, and very fraudulent.” Advocates, meanwhile, have cast it as a fairer, less polarizing way to capture the will of the people.

After an October New York Times report said the campaign of Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola had worked to recruit the second Dan Sullivan, criticism of the system intensified.

The president has railed against ranked choice voting, arguing that Democrats took advantage of it to confuse Alaska voters in last week’s election, and pointing out that it pitted three Republicans against one Democrat in the state’s race for governor. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, the Democratic nominee, did eventually win the election, flipping the seat from red to blue for the first time in decades with the help of an endorsement from Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Ranked choice voting, the president wrote on X in October, “shouldn’t be allowed in our Country.”

“I just left Alaska where we have a real bad thing, they have the ranked choice voting,” he said at a rally later that month, ripping into the Alaska Senate race. “You go into I guess some kind of a test tube or something and they pick whoever they want. That’s another disgrace.” It was not clear what he was referring to.