Alaska RCV Update

About 75% of the votes were counted in Alaska by Wednesday (numbers continue to change). Of course, some of these are not really votes but simply first-place rankings, which may be shifted to other candidates or eliminated when all ballots are in and the rounds of ranked-choice voting (RCV) begin. This is scheduled to happen in two weeks, on Nov. 18.

As it stands now, former Rep. Mary Peltola’s political trickery could succeed in stealing the race for U.S. Senate. While Daniel J. “Decoy Dan” Sullivan has just 3,583 votes, that is more than five times the difference in the race between incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (102,075 votes) and Peltola (102,701 votes). Another decoy candidate apparently recruited by the Peltola political team received 4,821 votes. If the RCV process happened now, second- and third-place rankings would push Sen. Sullivan ahead by 328 votes.

So far, 586 voters have ranked Decoy Dan first and the incumbent second, suggesting that they were in fact unsure. Another 233 ballots were voided because voters ranked two or more candidates first, including many who ranked both Sullivans first.

In the Alaska governor’s race, it appears more voters preferred a Republican, but the Democrat is almost guaranteed to win. This is because there were three Republicans and just one Democrat on the ballot. As rounds of RCV tabulation take place, it appears likely that enough “exhausted ballots” will be removed to shrink the denominator and make it appear that the Democrat has majority support.

Despite all this confusion—or perhaps because some political operatives benefit from it—there was more than $10 million spent to defend the top-four RCV system from Ballot Measure 2, which would have repealed it. More than $5 million came from Unite America, a dark-money group based in Colorado, with another $1 million coming from labor unions, including the National Education Association. All that spending appears to have propped up RCV once again, although many ballots remain to be counted.