Protect My Ballot

The new system was approved by voters in 2019, but critics, including at least one top mayoral candidate, fear that it may disenfranchise minority voters.

Originally ran in The New York Times, written by Dana Rubinstein, Jeffery C. Mays and Emma G. Fitzsimmons.

Next year was supposed to be when New York City would revolutionize how voters choose their mayor — not merely selecting one candidate, but picking as many as five and ranking them in order of preference.

New York’s take-no-prisoners political landscape was to be remade: Candidates would perhaps be more collegial and would be obliged to reach out to voters beyond their bases in the hope that other candidates’ supporters would list them as a second or third choice. Runoff elections, often expensive and with limited turnout, would be eliminated.

But just as the city is poised to put the ranked-choice voting system in place, opposition is mounting. Black elected officials have raised objections, arguing that absent substantial voter education, the system will effectively disenfranchise voters of color.

On Tuesday night, six New York City Council members filed suit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan seeking to stop the city from starting the new voting system. One leading Black mayoral candidate — Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, who once supported the system — now says it’s being rushed.

 “From my discussions with New Yorkers in lower-income communities of color, I am concerned that not enough education has been done about rank-choice voting to ensure a smooth transition to that method so soon,” Mr. Adams said in a statement.

Raymond J. McGuire, a Black business executive who is running for mayor, also questioned whether voters had received enough education about ranked-choice voting and said that without that education, he was “concerned” that the system would “disenfranchise Black and brown voters.”

Seventy-four percent of New York City voters approved ranked-choice voting in 2019. Under the new system, if a candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, that candidate wins outright. If no candidate wins a majority, the last-place winner is eliminated. The second-choice votes of those who had favored the last-place candidate would be counted instead. The process continues until there is a winner.

But with the mayoral primary less than seven months away, some campaigns are worried that the system could hurt Black candidates. They argue that a traditional approach would increase the chances of a runoff, where a Black candidate might perform better in a contest with only two names on the ballot.

Critics also question whether the city’s problem-prone Board of Elections can roll out such a complicated system during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Two of the six Council members who brought the lawsuit, Adrienne E. Adams and I. Daneek Miller, lead the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus. The other four — Laurie A. Cumbo, Robert E. Cornegy Jr., Farah N. Louis and Alicka Ampry-Samuel — represent districts in Brooklyn, which is Mr. Adams’s home base.

The suit was filed by a law firm where Frank V. Carone, the counsel to the Brooklyn Democratic Party, is an executive partner.

 “They say all throughout the country that ranked-choice voting is working well for communities of color,” Ms. Cumbo, who has endorsed Mr. Adams for mayor, said during a Council hearing on Monday. “Well, New York City is a totally different city.”

The lawsuit was filed against the city, its Board of Elections and its Campaign Finance Board, contending that the city and the two boards had violated the law by failing to adequately explain the software that will be used to tabulate the votes and by failing to conduct a sufficient public education campaign to familiarize voters with the new system.

The suit seeks to prohibit the city from starting the new system in a February special election, a race that was poised to be a trial run for the June Democratic mayoral primary, which would use the same system and is likely to determine the city’s next mayor.

“The board does not comment on pending litigation,” said Valerie Vazquez, a spokeswoman for the elections board. “However, as we have previously stated, we will be ready to implement ranked-choice voting just as we successfully implemented a new voting system in 2010 and launched early voting in 2019.”

Amy Loprest, executive director of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, said that the board has been working on its educational efforts all year, and a formal public awareness campaign will launch soon.

Since November of 2016, ranked-choice voting has been used in Maine for all its state and federal primary elections as well as all general congressional elections and the general election for president starting this year. It has also been used in five Democratic presidential caucuses and primaries this year and in at least 18 municipalities around the country, according to FairVote, a nonpartisan election reform group that is a leading proponent of ranked-choice voting.

Some mayoral candidates seem to be factoring the new voting system into their campaign strategies, including Shaun Donovan, the former Obama administration cabinet member who formally announced his run on Tuesday. An “electability” slide show circulated on his behalf argued that “Shaun’s broad appeal makes him a natural second and third choice for voters, even when they are already committed to another candidate.”

Carlos Menchaca, a councilman from Brooklyn who is running for mayor, said he has already had discussions with at least one other candidate about running together — urging voters to choose a team of two candidates as their two top choices.

“Ranked-choice voting allows for partnership on the campaign trail,” he said.

Maya Wiley, another Black candidate, supports ranked-choice voting and said runoffs in the prior system diluted the votes of people of color and working-class New Yorkers.

“I look forward to continuing my campaign to reach New Yorkers in every corner of the city with our vision for a reimagined city that is more fair and just for everyone,” Ms. Wiley said in a statement.

Good-government groups say that the new system enhances democracy.

“The truth of the matter is that ranked-choice voting puts power into the hands of the voter,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York. “And to the extent that there are party officials who are used to having undue influence over who the winner might be, I can see where they would be frightened by ranked-choice voting.”

But critics of the system argue that without adequate public education, the system confuses voters and thus disenfranchises them. They also contend that the voting system targets a party system heavily populated by leaders of color.

Kirsten John Foy, president of the activism group Arc of Justice, said he was exploring a separate lawsuit with Hazel N. Dukes, the president of the New York State chapter of the NAACP, arguing that Black and other minority voters would be disenfranchised by ranked-choice voting.

“Some progressive white folks got together in a room and thought this would be good, but it’s not good for our community,” Ms. Dukes said. “The voters did vote, so we can’t overturn that, but we want a stay because there’s been no education about this in our community.”

Mr. Foy also questioned the motives of those leading the effort to enact ranked-choice voting.

“The primary argument for ranked-choice voting is that it expands access to elected office for Black and brown officials, but we don’t have that problem,” said Mr. Foy, who listed a string of positions from state attorney general to borough presidents that are held by Black and Latino elected officials. “This is a solution in search of a problem.”

But Bertha Lewis, president of the Black Institute, said that there was “plenty of time for voters to learn to rank their vote.”

“Let me say it plainly: Black voters are not stupid,” she said in testimony submitted to the Council hearing on Monday. “It is insulting to say that they will not be able to understand.”

Ranked-choice voting has a long and complicated history in the United States.

“There was a period over 100 years ago when it was in use in some cities,” but it fell out of favor around World War II, according to David C. Kimball, a political-science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

In the past two decades, it has gained traction in places including San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., and in Maine.

The research on its impact on voter turnout is, however, mixed, he said, and voter education is a must, as American voters are accustomed to voting for just one candidate, not five.

“I don’t know quite how to put this politely, but the New York City elections board has trouble tying its shoes, metaphorically speaking,” Professor Kimball said. “So asking them to roll out new voting rules in a matter of months is a big ask.”

Dana Rubinstein is a reporter on the Metro desk covering New York City politics. Before joining The Times in 2020, she spent nine years at the publication now known as Politico New York. 

Jeffery C. Mays is a reporter on the Metro Desk who covers politics with a focus on New York City Hall. A native of Brooklyn, he is a graduate of Columbia University.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief, covering politics in New York City. She previously covered the transit beat and breaking news.

Voters in Alaska and Massachusetts weigh a wonky election change.

Originally ran in The Wall Street Journal, written by The Editorial Board.

Electoral reforms often don’t have the results proponents foresee—witness campaign-finance rules that empower wealthy candidates, or “independent” redistricting bodies that also gerrymander. So it is with ranked-choice voting (RCV), an idea that has taken hold in two dozen mostly liberal cities. On Nov. 3, RCV will face its biggest electoral test to date as voters in Alaska and Massachusetts decide whether to adopt it statewide.

A Case Study of Maine and Analysis of 96 Other Jurisdictions

Introduction

A movement currently sparking interest across the country, including in Alaska, is called ranked-choice voting (RCV), also known as instant run-off voting (IRV). Several U.S. municipalities have experimented with ranked-choice voting for more than a decade. For example, the City of San Francisco, California has been using ranked-choice voting since 2004.^[1] Via a 2016 ballot initiative, Maine launched a bold experiment by becoming the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting statewide. This case study has been created using data previously compiled by the Maine Policy Institute from those municipal elections and Maine. The results analyzed are from 96 elections in the U.S. that triggered ranked-choice voting. Put differently, these election results were compiled from 96 races where more than one round of tabulation occurred.

Using this data, we can examine and draw conclusions about ranked-choice voting and compare Maine’s most recent experience with other jurisdictions to identify patterns. The goal of this report is to analyze the history, claims, and mechanisms of ranked-choice voting in an attempt to understand how the system works, its merits and shortcomings, and how it compares to plurality elections and other voting systems.

Click here to read the full report.

Originally posted by The Hill and written by Reid Wilson.

Voters in November will decide whether to make substantial changes to election laws in more than a dozen states, where ballot measures would reshape the way elected officials are chosen, districts are drawn and campaigns are run.

The rush of ballot measures to overhaul voting and elections procedures is a new front in the war over voting rights, one that has become more heated in the four years since President Trump won the Electoral College, and the White House, while losing the popular vote.

“Since 2016, there’s been this focus on elections,” said Josh Altic, a ballot measure expert at Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan website that tracks political news. “You see a potential movement trying to gain traction.”

Ballot measures in Alaska and Massachusetts would implement ranked-choice voting, in which a voter chooses his or her top three or four candidates. Candidates who finish last are eliminated in rounds, and their votes are redistributed accordingly until one candidate ends with more than 50 percent of the vote.

Maine and New York City have already implemented ranked-choice voting; in 2018, Democrat Jared Golden beat Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-Maine) after votes for minor-party candidates were redistributed. Two more ranked-choice initiatives, in North Dakota and Arkansas, failed to make the ballot this year.

Voters in Colorado will be asked to decide whether the state should join the national popular vote movement, in which a state pledges its electoral votes to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes nationwide. Several state legislatures have voted to join the compact, but voters have never had the chance to weigh in themselves.

California voters will be asked whether to grant the vote to people on parole and whether 17-year-olds should be allowed to vote in local elections. In Mississippi, voters will be asked whether to end a Reconstruction-era practice in which a gubernatorial candidate must win a majority of legislative districts, along with the popular vote. Idaho voters will be asked to increase the number of state legislative districts.

In Virginia, the legislature has asked voters to approve a measure creating an independent redistricting commission. In Missouri, legislators want voters to repeal an independent commission approved several years ago.

Two states run by conservative legislatures — Alabama and Florida — will weigh whether to amend their constitutions to limit voting to citizens, even though noncitizens cannot vote in either place. Those measures appear aimed at ginning up voter turnout among Republicans.

Across the country, voters will be asked to decide on 116 ballot measures, constitutional amendments, referenda and initiatives. Some have been referred to voters by legislators who want to clean up founding documents; Utah will ask voters whether to change pronouns in the state constitution to non-gender-specific language. Utah and Nebraska both want to eliminate passages in their constitutions that allow slavery as a punishment for crimes, antiquated language that has not been enforced for a century or more.

Voters in Mississippi will be asked to ratify a new flag design after the state retired a flag that included a Confederate symbol. Voters in Rhode Island will be asked to change the state’s official name, dropping a reference to plantations.

Other initiatives have been paid for by special interest groups that are spending tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to pass legislation that benefits them specifically.

The most expensive fight is in California, where tech companies are fighting to override a 2019 law that defines gig workers as employees rather than independent contractors. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates have contributed a combined total of $180 million to the campaign — likely making it the second-most expensive political contest of 2020, after the battle for the White House.

“On occasion, big special interests decide it’s easier to go around the legislature and put something that is primarily and singly for themselves on the ballot,” said Gale Kaufman, a Democratic strategist in Sacramento who works on ballot measures and who is working against the tech companies.

Another pricey fight is happening in Illinois, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) — an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune — is virtually single-handedly funding a ballot measure to create a graduated income tax. Pritzker has contributed $56.5 million to the campaign, while billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin has dropped $20 million into the campaign against the tax.

The push to legalize marijuana for recreational or medicinal use, a fight that has advanced through ballot initiatives in recent years, will be on the ballot in Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota this year. Oregon voters will be asked to legalize psychedelic mushrooms.

Some of those measures — and issues such as a $15 minimum wage proposal in Florida, a ban on abortions after 22 weeks in Colorado, and sports betting proposals in Maryland and South Dakota — might increase turnout among voters who are deeply interested in one particular issue but who are not motivated by the presidential contest.

But researchers cast doubt on a ballot initiative’s ability to drive turnout, especially in a year when so many say they are enthusiastic and excited about voting.

“Who’s going to be turning out that wasn’t already going to vote in a presidential election? It’s the niche issues like marijuana that has the ability to do something like that. And it’s marginal,” said Craig Burnett, a political scientist at Hofstra University who studies ballot measures. “There’s a subset of people who care about that issue enough to make a special effort” to vote.

Ballot measures have become increasingly expensive in recent years. Spending on initiative campaigns topped $1 billion in both 2016 and 2018, according to Ballotpedia’s tracking, and Altic said the group has recorded $565 million spent so far this year — a number that will rise rapidly in the closing seven weeks of the race.

There are fewer measures on ballots this year than in 2018, when voters faced 155 proposals, or in 2016, when 162 measures qualified. Dozens of proposed initiatives fell victim to the coronavirus pandemic, when lockdowns brought a halt to signature-gathering efforts in many states.

While some voters say they do not have time to understand myriad complex issues on the ballot every year — California’s ballot has 12 measures this year, and Colorado’s has 11 — direct democracy remains a popular avenue for driving change, especially in Western states.

“Voters like ballot initiatives,” Kaufman said. “They may complain about the number, but they like the opportunity and the option of voting on serious issues, and they take it seriously.”

Originally written by Ryan Byrne and posted on Ballotpedia.

On August 24, a Maine Superior Court ruled that voters will decide a veto referendum on a law that established ranked-choice voting (RCV) for presidential primaries and general elections. Maine was slated to use RCV for the presidential election on November 3, 2020. Since the veto referendum qualified for the ballot, however, the law is suspended until voters decide to either uphold or repeal it. Therefore, RCV will not be used to elect the president in Maine this year.

The Superior Court’s ruling came after Secretary of State Matt Dunlap (D) determined that not enough signatures were valid to place the referendum on the ballot. Judge Thomas McKeon disagreed with Dunlap’s interpretation of a constitutional provision, which states that circulators’ names must appear on voter registration rolls. Dunlap invalidated 988 signatures from two circulators, also known as signature gatherers, who were not registered to vote while collecting signatures. However, the two circulators were registered to vote when signatures were submitted to the state for review. According to Judge McKeon, a circulator being registered at the time of signature submission, rather than while collecting signatures, was sufficient to meet the constitutional requirement. Dunlap could appeal the court’s decision to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.

In 2019, the Maine State Legislature passed the bill that expanded RCV to presidential elections. Gov. Janet Mills (D) held LD 1083 until 2020. By holding the bill until the next legislative session, LD 1083 did not go into effect until after the state’s presidential primary on March 3, 2020.

The Maine Republican Party is backing the veto referendum campaign, which is known as Repeal RCV. Through August 18, Repeal RCV had raised $706,410, including $639,430 from the Maine GOP and $50,000 from Gary Bahre and Robert Bahre. Demi Kouzounas, chairperson of the state GOP, is also chairperson of Repeal RCV.

The veto referendum would be the third RCV ballot measure in Maine since 2016. Voters approved Question 5, which established a first-in-the-nation statewide system of RCV, in 2016. In 2017, the legislature passed a bill that was written to postpone and repeal RCV unless the legislature referred and voters approved a constitutional amendment. The Committee for Ranked-Choice Voting, which sponsored Question 5, launched a veto referendum campaign to overturn LD 1646. On the ballot as Question 1, the veto referendum was approved with 53.9 percent of the vote. Therefore, LD 1646 was repealed and RCV remained in effect, except for general elections for state legislative and executive offices. The Committee for Ranked-Choice Voting is again seeking to preserve RCV and launched a PAC, which received $52,570 through August 18, to oppose this year’s referendum.

At the election on November 6, 2018, ranked-choice voting (RCV) was used for the first time in a general election. Both Sen. Angus King (I) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D) won their respective seats without the need for ranked-choice tabulations. In Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, the initial vote count showed that incumbent Bruce Poliquin (R) had received 46.3 percent of the vote and challenger Jared Golden (D) received 45.6 percent of the vote. Independents received 8.1 percent of the vote. On November 15, 2018, Dunlap announced that after the lowest vote-getters were eliminated and votes were reallocated, incumbent Rep. Poliquin received 49.4 percent of the vote and challenger Golden received 50.6 percent of the vote. The race was the first in U.S. history where ranked-choice voting was used to decide a congressional election.

In November, voters in Alaska and Massachusetts will decide ballot measures to adopt RCV as well. Voters in Arkansas could also vote on a RCV measure, pending a judicial ruling.

Others — like Bloomington and Minnetonka — should be wary of going down this road.

Originally ran in the StarTribune. 

Recently I’ve heard from friends across the country who ask the same question: How did Minneapolis, once known as an innovative, trendsetting city, so quickly become a city adrift without bold leaders? It’s an easy question to answer if you consider how Minneapolis elects its mayor and City Council: In 2009, Minneapolis adopted an untested method of electing city officials called ranked-choice voting. RCV is now partly responsible for the demise of our once-great city and threatens the vibrancy of others who are following in our footsteps.

Like many bad ideas that Minneapolis adopted in recent years, RCV is now under consideration by previously thoughtful and well-managed suburbs like Bloomington and Minnetonka. They would be wise to consider the lessons learned the hard way in cities that have rushed to adopt RVC and have seen great confusion in subsequent elections. RVC also fails to ensure that during these important times, every ballot counts.

Ask most Minneapolis voters about how ranked-choice voting works and you’ll get many different answers — until you ask the political power brokers who brought this mess into our city. They seem to be the only ones informed about how the confusing process works and why it’s preferential to the traditional one-person, one-vote system that seemed to work well in electing a long history of great Minneapolis leaders.

Ranked-choice voting was sold to Minneapolis voters as a way to increase voter participation and to foster positive campaigns. In fact, it has had little positive effect on campaigns, and voter turnout remains low. In our last mayoral election (which was also the third using RCV), voter turnout in Minneapolis was only 43%. The victor in that 16-candidate race was Jacob Frey, who prevailed after five rounds of counting that was not complete on Election Day. In the previous mayoral election of 2013, Betsy Hodges prevailed in a 35-candidate race that took 33 rounds of counting. Even then, she only received a plurality of the votes, totaling 48.95%.

The two Minnesota cities that have experience using RCV, Minneapolis and St. Paul, are far behind many major metropolitan cities in municipal election voter turnout. RVC doesn’t revive voter apathy — competitive races that engage a broad swath of the electorate does. In fact, if RCV advocates truly want to drive greater voter engagement and turnout, they would allow nonpartisan municipal elections to occur during midterm election years. Odd-year elections are a holdover from the Progressive Era in politics. Progressives enacted a series of electoral reforms designed to “make it harder for political machines to corrupt local elections.” Indeed, their campaign mantra at the time was that they wanted “an informed electorate, not just a big one.”

In fact, several progressive communities like Aspen, Colo., and Burlington, Vt., have repealed RCV after witnessing much of what Minneapolis voters have seen: RCV fails to produce more positive campaigns with higher voter participation. It makes balloting very confusing for voters, but importantly, it fails to produce a majority of votes for the winner (one of RCV’s key talking points) and it takes days and sometimes weeks to tally the eventual winners.

In 2018, Maine election officials spent nine days tabulating the confusing RCV ballots cast for Congress that also failed to produce a majority of votes cast for the eventual winner. The Maine Policy Institute conducted postelection research that determined that “in 96 races examined, 61% failed to produce a true majority winner.” Mainers were so disillusioned by the 2018 RCV experiment that their 2020 ballot will include a citizen-driven ballot initiative to repeal statewide RCV. It’s interesting to note that the only state to adopt RCV is now preparing to repeal it.

But the most disturbing fact that RCV advocates fail to mention when selling this confusing proposal is that “one-person, one-vote” is a bedrock principle of our democracy. In ranked-choice voting, sometimes your vote does not count in determining the final winner. That’s because you may have selected as your top three choices candidates who are quickly eliminated from consideration. In that case, your ballot is discarded and your vote no longer counts. To avoid “ballot exhaustion” or discarding your ballot, voters must be clairvoyant on the eventual outcome when choosing their top three candidates. To vote otherwise means your vote won’t count.

I don’t need to tell anyone that all of the events of 2020 have left many Americans feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and fearful for our republic. Yet many of us look ahead toward Nov. 3 with hope and expectations that our election will occur, and that every vote will be tabulated in a safe, secure and timely manner. When a winner is announced on Election Day, a smooth and peaceful government transition will proceed as it has for more than 230 years.

Election Day reminds us all that elections are about determining what is best for our city, state and nation as well as for preserving our republic. Elections are not about preserving political power for a few, which is ultimately the only promise fulfilled by ranked-choice voting.

Annette Meeks is CEO of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota. She lives and works in Minneapolis.

The Protect My Ballot campaign is out to stop ranked-choice voting.

Originally ran on Reason.

A surging number of states and localities are thinking about adopting ranked-choice voting, an alternative approach to running an election that offers more room for independent and third-party candidates. This, in turn, has sparked a backlash from the defenders of the traditional system.

Come November, voters in Alaska, Massachusetts, and North Dakota, among other places, will decide whether to adopt ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to rank candidates on the ballot in order of preference instead of choosing just one.

If a candidate gets an outright majority of first-preference votes, he or she wins. If no one gets a majority, the candidate who received the least number of first-preference votes is eliminated. The votes they received are transferred over to voters’ second preference. The process repeats until one candidate receives a majority of transferred votes. The process is also known as “instant runoff” voting, because it simulates a run-off election.

Proponents say that ranked-choice voting would increase representation and expand options for voters beyond the two main parties. The system is currently used in limited circumstances in 23 states, including for local elections, and primary races. Only Maine uses rank-choice voting for statewide elections.

Melodie Wilterdink of the Alaska Policy Forum, a conservative think tank, argues that ranked-choice voting “doesn’t allow everyone’s ballot to be counted.” If voters are asked to rank four candidates in an eight-candidate race, there is a chance all four candidates will be knocked out, resulting in “ballot exhaustion” and a discarded vote.

Last week the Alaska Policy Forum, alongside the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, the Maine Policy Institute, and the Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs, formed the Protect My Ballot coalition to oppose ranked-choice voting.

Confusion about how the system works could suppress voter turnout even more, argues Wilterdink. In Maine, she notes, election officials had to print a 19-page instruction manual on how to vote.

David Kimball, a political scientist at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, disagrees. When ranked-choice voting replaces a two-tiered primary and general election system, he finds, turnout increases by up to 10 percent because voters only have to show up to the polls once.

Kimball also says that ballot exhaustion doesn’t affect a large number of voters. “These are the people who prefer the least preferred candidates, so you’re generally talking relatively smaller percentages of voters,” he tells Reason.

Where ranked-choice voting is used today, the public largely approves of the method, though support has varied widely across jurisdictions.

Exit polling from local elections in North Carolina shows large majorities—68 percent in Cary and 67 percent in Hendersonville—prefer it to traditional voting. Data from Maine’s statewide races shows much narrower support, with approval largely following party lines: 81 percent of Democrats want to expand it while 72 percent of Republicans would eliminate it. (Other states, like Wilterdink’s native Alaska, don’t see a partisan divide: Both former Gov. Sean Parnell, a Republican, and former Sen. Mark Begich, a Democrat, oppose ranked-choice voting.)

That’s not to say that ranked-choice voting has been a success everywhere. As Protect My Ballot’s website notes, North Carolina; Aspen, Colorado; and Burlington, Vermont have repealed ranked-choice voting, often after just one election. Voters in Burlington, which ditched ranked-choice voting in 2010, will soon decide whether to reinstate the system.

This article was originally published by the Maine Wire.

A coalition of state-based think tanks launched a new nationwide campaign Friday to educate voters about the pitfalls of ranked-choice voting, a complex voting system that has been the subject of scrutiny in jurisdictions where it has been enacted. The campaign, called Protect My Ballot, will educate voters in jurisdictions where proposed legislation or ballot initiatives seek to implement the ranked-choice voting election system.

Ranked-choice voting has emerged as an alternative to plurality voting and calls on voters to rank candidates in order of preference on their ballot, rather than cast a single vote for their most preferred candidate. If no candidate achieves a majority of the votes cast in the first round, the candidate with the fewest first round votes is eliminated and their votes are reallocated to other candidates based on voters’ second and subsequent rankings. The process repeats until a candidate obtains a majority of the remaining votes.

However, the system has shown to lead to high levels of ballot exhaustion due to ballot marking mistakes and exhausted choices. It’s also been shown to decrease turnout among minority populations and increase ballot exhaustion among elderly and less-educated voters.

The coalition, led by Alaska Policy Forum, is also comprised of Maine Policy Institute, Freedom Foundation of Minnesota and the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. The video bellow offers a brief synopsis of how the ranked-choice voting system works and how it can actually discount voters’ ballots.

The State of Alaska is currently grappling with a ballot initiative being advanced by a Colorado-based political action committee that has spent more than $1 million to place the so-called “Better Elections” initiative on the state’s November general election ballot. On Friday, Former Democrat U.S. Senator from Alaska, Mark Begich, and the state’s former Republican governor, Sean Parnell, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal expressing their opposition to Alaska adopting the ranked-choice system.

Bipartisan opposition to ranked-choice voting is common throughout the country. Current and former Democratic governors from California, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom, both have publicly opposed ranked-choice voting. Brown said the system “deprives voters of genuinely informed choice,” and Newsom said it has “led to voter confusion and the promise that ranked-choice voting leads to greater democracy is not necessarily fulfilled.”

As noted in the WSJ op-ed, the system has also been opposed by New York’s chapter of the NAACP, and three Democratic members of the City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus said RCV hurts immigrants and communities of color. Republican State Sen. Mark Koran of Minnesota recently co-sponsored bipartisan legislation to prohibit the use of ranked-choice voting in his state, saying “Every vote should count, and every vote should be as simple as ‘I picked my top candidate.’”

Voters can learn more about the campaign and ranked-choice voting at ProtectMyBallot.com.