How to cheat with ranked-choice voting
by Trent England
Alaska has become a case study in how to manipulate elections within its top-four ranked-choice voting system. The latest scam comes from Democrats hoping to upset sitting U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan. The scheme? Run Dan Sullivan—another one.
There are two ways this “Decoy Dan” could help Democrats, and neither is very democratic. The first would be to suppress the vote for the real Sen. Sullivan enough to keep him out of the general election. The second, more likely trick would be to get both Sullivans into the general.
In Alaska, all candidates for a particular office run in a single primary. This can result in a list of a dozen—or even dozens—of candidates. (Here is an official sample ballot for the upcoming primary.) Each voter can vote for one candidate, and the four with the most votes advance to the general election.
If enough voters are confused in the primary, it could suppress Sen. Sullivan’s share of the vote, and also lead to the other Sullivan being one of the four candidates in the general election.
In that election, voters can rank candidates—up to all four of them. This has allowed some Democrats to pretend that none of this matters, since a voter could rank one Dan first and the other second. They know, however, that many voters don’t rank all the candidates and that many simply indicate their first choice. They also know that confusion can work as vote suppression: Some voters, uncertain about what to do, will do nothing.
Alaska’s absurd top-four RCV election system makes all this possible. As Professor Derek Muller has explained:
This effort is driven by Alaska’s top-four ranked-choice voting structure. In a traditional primary, some ballot label would have distinguished the incumbent from the “decoy,” the “decoy” could never manage to knock off the incumbent, and the incumbent Republican would advance to the general election; no insurgent candidate would file. But in this “top four,” the question is whether just enough voters–as few as a few hundred or few thousand–could advance Dan J. to the general election, then try to confuse voters as to how to rank to allow the Democratic candidate to edge out the Republican. On the heels of a felon incarcerated in New Jersey appearing on the ballot in 2024 with the Democratic party label, the system is not exactly designed to handle worst-case scenarios.