ANCHORAGE, AK — Rarely do elections in Alaska draw as much national attention (and national money) as the upcoming midterms, in which the balance of power in the Senate could hinge on the race between Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democratic challenger Mary Peltola.

That Senate race has also brought attention to Alaska’s highly unusual voting system, in which candidates compete in an open, nonpartisan primary, after which the top four candidates advance to a general election decided by ranked choice voting.

That election system itself is on the ballot on Tuesday: Alaska Ballot Measure 2 seeks to repeal the open-primary and ranked-choice reforms, which voters adopted only six years ago.

The fight over Measure 2 has drawn millions from outside groups and wealthy donors. Right-wing billionaires, including Elon Musk and Jeff Yass, have spent heavily to repeal the reforms. Meanwhile, centrist billionaires like Michael Bloomberg and Kathryn Murdoch have spent even more to defend them.

The open-primary and ranked-choice system is reviled by MAGA-aligned Republicans, who describe it as rigging elections in favor of Democrats and blame it for facilitating the alleged scheme to recruit a spoiler candidate, also named Dan Sullivan, onto the ballot.

But the system’s proponents argue that ranked-choice voting and open primaries actually mitigate ballot spoilers and other underhanded election strategies. They credit the reforms with reducing polarization and achieving a degree of cross-partisan cooperation they say is unique to Alaska.

And they fear that if Measure 2 is successful, it could mean the end of bipartisan election reform nationwide.

The origins of reform

Alaska’s voting system is largely the brainchild of Scott Kendall, an attorney who worked as chief of staff for Bill Walker, Alaska’s governor from 2014 to 2018 (at the time the only independent governor in the United States). Frustrated at state legislators who refused bipartisan compromise for fear of primary challenges, Kendall began pushing for reform.

With the help of several million dollars in donations from Unite America, a cross-partisan election reform group bankrolled largely by Kathryn Murdoch, the wife of James Murdoch, the reform campaign successfully won a ballot measure in 2020, and the overhauled system was first deployed in 2022.

The key component of the system Kendall designed is the open primary, which forces candidates to campaign for votes from the entire electorate rather than from the base of a single party. This mostly neutralized the threat of hyper-partisan primary challenges, which Trump-aligned Republicans have successfully used across the country to dethrone more centrist elected officials.

The top-four vote getters in the primary then advance to the general election, in which Alaska uses a system of ranked-choice voting. This means that rather than select a single candidate, voters can rank their choices in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority, the candidate in last place is eliminated and their votes are redistributed according to voters’ next choices, until a winner emerges.

Even though Alaska’s electoral system is often reduced to ranked-choice voting, Kendall said this is a secondary aspect of the system, designed as a complement to the open primary to prevent candidates from the same party from splitting the vote and handing victory to an opponent.

The reformed voting system has already had beneficial results, according to Kendall.

“Right now in Alaska, our elected officials, especially in our state legislature, are incentivized to serve all of their constituents, instead of being incentivized to say bad things about the other party,” Kendall said.

The Alaska legislature is unusually bipartisan, with both the state house and senate governed by coalitions of Democrats and Republicans. Though these coalitions predate the reforms, Kendall says open primaries have made them much more stable, since politicians—primarily Republicans—who make alliances across the aisle can no longer be disciplined in a party primary.

Proponents of the reform say this arrangement properly reflects the unusually independent nature of Alaska’s electorate, in which 64 percent of voters are not affiliated with either party.

“Alaskans don’t eschew political parties just because they haven’t had the time to think about it,” said Ashley Carrick, a Democratic state representative from Fairbanks who forms part of a governing bipartisan coalition. “They eschew them because they don’t feel represented by these parties.”

The case against the current system

The campaign behind Measure 2, which would repeal the reforms passed in 2020, says its objections are primarily to ranked-choice voting, rather than to open primaries or other provisions in the reforms (such as a ban on dark money in campaigns).

Ranked-choice voting, they say, can be confusing to voters, who might still vote for a single candidate without understanding they are supposed to rank the other choices. If those voters select a single candidate who does not advance, their ballots become irrelevant in later rounds of vote distribution.

Moreover, critics say that confusion produced by ranked-choice voting can be exploited in bad faith.

“You can kind of moneyball ranked-choice voting,” said Greg Powers, a consultant for Repeal Now, one of the main groups behind Measure 2. “It invites gamesmanship.”

Powers said the scandal surrounding the presence of two men named Dan Sullivan on the senate ballot is an example of such gamesmanship. Some voters, he said, are likely to be confused by the ranking aspect of the ballot, and might choose the spoiler Dan Sullivan when they intended to vote for the incumbent, without ranking any other candidates on the ballot.

However, defenders of ranked-choice voting say the system actually mitigates—or even completely neutralizes—the damage done by a spoiler candidate. In the Alaska example, a voter can rank both the incumbent Dan Sullivan and his namesake challenger, thus ensuring the vote ultimately goes to the right candidate.

“Our system is not the cause,” Kendall said. “It’s the cure.”

A pretext for election interference?

Nevertheless, MAGA Republicans have been making a direct connection between the Dan Sullivan spoiler scheme and Alaska’s reformed voting system.

“This never would have happened if we didn’t have ranked-choice voting,” Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy told Fox News on Friday, referring to the scandal surrounding the second Dan Sullivan.

When Donald Trump spoke at a rally in Wasilla this month, he called ranked-choice voting a “Dumbocrat scam.”

“All it is is a way to cheat,” Trump said. “You go in number one, and you think you won, and you come out number two, you come out number three. You got some guy sitting behind a table, I guess, just picking a winner.”

Proponents of Alaska’s current system say they worry these kinds of statements will encourage misinformed conservative voters to support Measure 2 and repeal the reforms—or worse, that Alaska’s unusual system may contribute a pretext to a Trump administration intent on interfering in the elections if they don’t go the president’s way.

Moreover, they say, claims that the open-primary and ranked-choice system facilitates cheating conceals the true nature of MAGA opposition to the reforms: that they defuse the right wing’s ability to punish more moderate Republicans. This, they say, is why someone like Elon Musk donated $1.5 million to a group supporting Measure 2.

“Narrow partisan interests who want direct control over elected officials, even though they don’t represent a majority view, are scared of losing their power,” Kendall said.

The national picture

Unite America, the billionaire-funded organization that helped pass the election reforms in 2020, is now the main group defending the new system against Measure 2. And despite the involvement of the likes of Elon Musk on the other side, Unite America has substantially outraised its opponents.

That’s because open primaries (sometimes but not always accompanied by ranked-choice voting) are the linchpin of a national movement to reform the election system to reduce partisan polarization, an effort in which Unite America is the major player.

That movement attempted to pass reforms comparable to Alaska’s in seven states during the 2024 elections, all of which failed.

Only three states (Alaska, California, and Washington) have fully open primaries, sometimes called “jungle primaries,” in which there is only one ballot with no party restrictions on participation. Alaska and Maine are the only states that use ranked-choice voting in statewide and national elections.

If Measure 2 succeeds in Alaska, experts say it could mean a bleak future for the Unite America’s national ambitions.

“If it gets killed in Alaska, that’s sort of the end of this particular approach to reform,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America and author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop.

That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, according to Drutman and other election reformers who advocate for more drastic changes (such as proportional representation) and say that centrist, Alaska-style reform is insufficient for addressing the ills afflicting American democracy.

Even those most directly involved in pasing—and now defending—Alaska’s reform concede that the 49th State has many idiosyncrasies (including its large share of independent voters), and that the same system might not work in other places.

Nevertheless, the system could work in states with similar demographics, namely those with small and largely rural populations, said John-Henry Heckendor, a managing partner at Ship Creek Group, a political consulting firm working against Measure 2.

Many of those states, Heckendorn said, have been effectively captured by the Republican Party, leading to a near-total lack of political competition, a situation that “isn’t serving those communities.”

“So how do you get back to competition?” said Heckendorn. “Where that need exists, you have the impetus to do these unconventional things that Alaska is doing.”

Alaska’s election reforms already survived one challenge, in 2024. And if they survive the challenge this year, Heckendorn said, it will allow the Alaska model—including the increasingly rare bipartisan coalition building in the state legislature—to prove its worth to other states.

Heckendorn compared the election reforms to a newly hatched turtle finding its way to sea.

“If it gets to the ocean, it can live there for a hundred years,” he said. “But it’s a very dangerous walk across the beach.”

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