Posted on by rjonakait

Ranked-Choice Voting for Senate: Maine and Alaska

Ranked-choice voting is in effect in the Alaska and Maine Senate races. Both states operate similarly, and in both states, the race is up for grabs. Each voter can rank the candidates in the order they prefer. So, for example, I can say my first choice is A, my second choice is B, and so on.

Here’s how it works: Assume four candidates and 100 voters. If 40 voters had A as their first choice, 35 for B, 15 for C, and 10 for D, no one has the majority required in a ranked-choice election. Another count is undertaken. The candidate with the lowest number of first place votes is dropped, D in this case, and the second-place choices on those ten ballots are reallocated to the candidates who were the second choices. 

Assume that five of the ten ballots where D was the first choice had A as the second choice and five had B as the second choice. That means that both A and B have five more votes, giving A 45 votes and B 40 votes. Still neither has a majority so we have another count. C is dropped and the second choices of the voters for C reallocated. If six or more of those second choices are for A, A has more than 50 votes, a majority, and is elected. If, on the other hand, eleven or more of those fifteen had B as their second choice, then B has the majority and is elected.

Maine is unlikely to be determined by ranked-choice voting in the Senatorial election because ranking choices comes into play only when there are three or more candidates. In Maine, although several people have mounted write-in campaigns, only two candidates are on the ballot.

One is Susan Collins, the only incumbent Republican Senator up for reelection in a state that voted for Kamala Harris. Troy Jackson is the Democratic candidate.

Jackson tries to tie Collins to Trump making it a standard pro-Trump /anti-Trump battle, but there are a couple of local issues, too. Immigration enforcement became a hot-button issue after ICE killed a Colombian immigrant in Maine a few months ago. Collins opposes Trump’s immigration enforcement, but she supported increasing the ICE budget. She asked, “Do you really want to get rid of an agency that deports violent criminals?”

Collins, it is often said, had the deciding vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. She stands by her vote. Kavanaugh was instrumental in voting for the Dobbs decision banning abortion. Jackson’s argument is, “Do you trust Collins to pick the next Supreme Court justice?” Jackson, who now supports abortion rights, did not always do so.

Collins touts her Senatorial seniority that has helped bring federal funds to Maine, more than $1.5 billion in recent years, she says. Jackson maintains that she has not leveraged her power wisely and tries to tie Collins to Trump for rising gas and grocery prices. Collins, on the other hand, accuses Jackson, who was a former Maine Senate president, of setting state policies that caused high energy and housing costs.

Finally, in Maine, which has significant trade with Canada, the Canadian tariffs are a flash point. Collins says that she has used her power with Trump to ameliorate the Canadian tariffs. She says that she got the tariff lifted on Canadian rock salt, which is important to Maine. Jackson responds, “You can’t eat rock salt.”

Polls have the Maine Senate race as a dead heat.

Alaska does have four candidates on the Senatorial ballot, but only two real contenders: Dan Sullivan, a Republican, a Harvard grad, a lawyer, a marine, and the current incumbent. He is opposed by Mary Peltola, a Democrat, a native American, a past member of the Alaska House of Representatives, and a one-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives. As elsewhere in the country, affordability, housing, and health care are campaign points. However, there are local issues. Alaska has a special epithet reserved for one’s opponent: To be aligned with the “Lower 48” is a terrible thing. This plays out in many ways. The federal government owns 60% of Alaskan lands, and the state is frequently in conflict with the federal government over drilling rights and roads. So, e.g., Sullivan says Peltola is “aligned with the Lower 48” by opposing expanded oil and gas drilling in the state; she, on the other hand, touts an oil project she supports that environmentalists have opposed.

The Alaska race also has a fierce battle over fisheries management. Fish are central to Alaska’s economy and identity, and fish are at the center of the campaign. Peltola, a Yup’ik Native American, says often she has been fishing since she was 6. Showing the importance of fisheries in Alaska, her campaign slogan is “Fish, Family, Freedom.”

The hot-button issue between the candidates is “bycatch,” the catching of salmon and other nontarget species from huge trawling vessels that harvest pollock and similar fish. Many blame bycatch for declines in salmon, halibut, and crab stocks. Peltola supports a ban on factory trawlers that combine fish harvests with onboard processing and distinguishes large out-of-state operators, mostly based in the state of Washington, from smaller Alaska-based operations.  Sullivan touts a bill he introduced in Congress called the Bycatch Reduction Act. Peltola plays up that the large fishing industry opposes her approach more than Sullivan’s, in essence saying if they are against me, you should be for me.

 The Trump/Doge cuts to fishery science and the National Weather Service have also been at issue. Musk supports Sullivan.

Finally, Alaska sees China as a huge market for its seafood, and tariffs have hurt this. Sullivan has stood with Trump on tariffs.

Peltola leads narrowly in the poll averages, but Alaska is a tossup. In Alaska, ranked choice might matter. Two minor candidates are also on the ballot. One is a Republican, and the other claims no party affiliation. If Peltola were to get the plurality but not the majority and the second choices on the minority candidate’s ballots are heavily for the Republican Sullivan, he could win even though coming in second on the initial count. If, however, Sullivan is leading without a majority on the initial count, but lost because the second choices favored Peltola, I predict that someone will be baselessly contending that Alaska was a stolen election. Trump has already labeled Alaska’s system as “stupid.”

There are several reasons given for ranked choice voting. It is said that it reduces mudslinging; a candidate does not want to alienate an opponent’s supporters, hoping to get second place choices. This deters ad hominem attacks and forces a focus on the issues. Also ranking assures that we don’t elect candidates who are opposed by a majority of the electorate. Sometimes, we elect a candidate with a plurality because there are enough third-party votes to prevent a majority. However, the third-party voters might have preferred the losing candidate to the winning one. In that case, the winner, was actually opposed by a majority. Finally, ranked choice voting eliminates a run-off election, which is costly, and in which turnout is often less than in a regular, general election.

Although ranked-choice voting is used in Alaska, it is not universally loved. It was adopted in 2020 in a statewide referendum with a bare 50.55% of the voters approving. A 2024 attempt to repeal the system was defeated by an even tinier margin with 50.12% voting to retain it. Another attempt to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting is on the ballot in November.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Primaries Rule

We tend to think of our country as a democracy, where “The People”– through the majority of the voters–rule. This, of course, is not completely true for many aspects of our government. The United States Senate is a prime example. The candidate who gets the most votes in a state becomes the Senator. This seems democratic enough until we realize that a minority of voters nationwide choose the majority of the Senators. Since each state, no matter how large or small its population, gets two and only two Senators, the overall composition of the body is markedly malapportioned. This, of course, is mandated by the Constitution.

Other less-then-democratic rules, however, are not constitutionally mandated but result from various political strictures and practices. Thus, the filibuster rule grants a minority of the already malapportioned Senate to dictate outcomes. In both Houses, committee chairs can determine what can be voted on, and this can defeat the will of the majority in those bodies. And so on.

We know that a minority of the voters can elect a president. That is partly because of the electoral college, which our constitutional founders gave us. In addition, however, the nonconstitutionally-mandated decision rule increases the likelihood of a minority president. Most states have decided that all its electoral votes will go to the candidate who gets the most votes. This is not constitutionally required, and at the beginning of our Republic, it was not the usual method for allocating electoral votes. Instead, states often split those votes, but now only a few states do that. So if I win a state with a large number of electors by a handful of votes, but I lose a state with a lesser number of electors by a significant amount, I may be behind in the popular vote but ahead in the crucial electoral count. The Constitution is silent on this outcome.

There is another decision rule, however, that can affect whether we have a minority president: the presence of third parties. In key swing states in 2016, Trump won not by getting a majority of the ballots. In most states he did not poll better than the Republican Romney had four years before. Instead, the third-party share of the votes increased, and Hillary Clinton got fewer votes in some states than Obama had four years earlier. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Trump got the plurality, not the majority, and got all the electoral votes. We don’t know, of course, what would have happened had the third parties not been on the ballot, but we should realize that the rules allowing candidates on the ballot matters. The more candidates on the ballot, the less likely it is that “The People”–i.e., the majority–control. These rules matter and vary from state to state, but few of us know what they are or whether they should be changed.

Primaries, especially in safe districts, also affect majority rule. By a “safe” district, I mean those in which it is all but certain that one party will win the general election. I reside in a place where a Democrat always wins the House, the state legislative, and the city seats. The November election is a mere formality. The only truly important election is the primary because it will determine which Democrat will run. I am hardly unique in living in such a place. A few years back I read a study with a sobering statistic: while 25% of the House seats were safe several decades ago, that number had increased to 60%. With unrestrained and more sophisticated gerrymandering, that percentage is even higher now.

Almost everywhere, the turnout for primaries is lower than for general elections, even when the general election is functionally meaningless. This can mean that a tiny fraction of the people determine who will have governmental power, but the situation can be even more striking when a primary is contested with several viable candidates. The rules are not uniform for deciding the outcome of such contests. I have voted under several different systems in New York City alone. In some primaries, a candidate polling over 40% moves on to the general election, but if they do not reach that threshold, another primary is held between the top two candidates. “Ranked choice” is now used for some New York primaries, and I would explain that to you if I could, but I am like most New Yorkers who, even though voting to adopt this system, do not fully understand how it works. But in some New York primaries, a simple plurality controls. (Oh, yes, New York City is a complicated place.)

New York has just completed primaries for the House of Representatives. New districts were drawn as a result of the last census which caused the state to lose one seat in the national legislature and made for some interesting primaries. Two sitting House members were thrown together in one district and faced each other in one primary. Another district did not have an incumbent and a half-dozen interesting candidates ran for the Democratic seat in the plurality-controlled contest. The winner polled 25.7% garnering fewer than 17,000 votes. And in what is almost certainly a safe seat, he will be going to the House in January. In other words, 17,000 people will have picked the new Representative. “The People,” I guess, have spoken.