Beware the ranked-choice voting Trojan horse

Freedom Unaffiliated

Beware the ranked-choice voting Trojan horse

By Mike Rosen

In the last hours of the 2024 Colorado legislative session, a group of county clerks crafted an amendment to Senate Bill 24-210 to temper the rush-to-judgment of a November ballot initiative that would impose statewide ranked-choice voting. They were concerned about public confusion over RCV, added costs, errors, and long delays in tabulating results. When the amendment passed, a coalition of leftist groups supporting the initiative threw a fit, claiming: ”The bill’s transparent attempt to frustrate and invalidate the will of the people as expressed through the citizens’ initiative process is an afront to the people of Colorado and the system of checks and balances that govern it.”

Whew, what hyperbole! All the amendment did was delay statewide implementation of RCV pending a series of 12 municipal pilot trials. Why the desperate haste of RCV activists?

This initiative is an RCV hybrid, a so-called “final-four plurality” with two phases. Party primaries for governor, other statewide executive offices, state legislature, and congress would be eliminated. Instead, candidates for those posts would run in a single open primary, regardless of party affiliation, with the four that get the most votes for each post advancing to the general election, the second phase, that would employ ranked-choice voting. On a grid-style ballot, rather than voting for just one candidate you’d vote for one or more candidates ranked in order of your preference (1, 2, 3, 4). A candidate that gets a majority of that vote for any position wins election immediately. If no candidate gets a majority, a second-round tabulation eliminates the candidate that got the fewest votes in the first round. The votes of the people who voted for that losing candidate as their first choice are then redistributed to the candidate they had selected as their second choice. If that doesn’t produce a majority winner the process continues in the same manner for as many rounds as necessary to produce a majority winner.

Are your eyes glazing over yet? I’ll be voting against it.

RCV formats differ from state to state, and some are even worse. Like another where you’re forced to rank all the candidates in numerical order. If you fail to do so — either by accident or design, perhaps because you despise a candidate or a particular political party — your ballot can be trashed. For instance, on a ballot that included candidates from the Green Party, Socialist Worker’s Party, or Communist Party U.S.A., I wouldn’t rank any of those given the possibility that the system would actually cast my vote for one of them in a later round. If, on principle, I vote solely for my preferred Republican candidate who then gets eliminated, my ballot is deemed “exhausted” and trashed as if I had never voted at all.

Under RCV, winning candidates are often elected with considerably less than a majority of all the votes originally cast. For example, in the first round of Alaska’s special congressional election in 2022, Republican candidates got 60% of the total vote. However, after 15,000 ballots were trashed in a succeeding round (including 11,000 from those who voted for one Republican and no one else) a Democrat won by only 5,000 votes.

RCV activists claim their convoluted voting schemes will hamper radical candidates and produce more moderate elected officials. Their definition of “radical” or “moderate” is dubious given the dominance of liberals and Democrats in the national RCV movement. Like FairVote, a left-wing Maryland think tank financed by the likes of America-hating socialist George Soros and the Tides Foundation, a clearing house that notoriously launders money to far-left causes from donors that don’t want to be publicly linked to them.

Leading the RCV initiative in Colorado and nationally is Unite America, a group that feigns bipartisanship but is dominated and funded by deep-pocket Democrats like Charles Wheelen and Kathryn Mordoch. Three former members of Congress on its board include two Democrats and one Republican, Carlos Curbelo, who was ranked as the most liberal Republican in Congress by the American Conservative Union.

RCV is vulnerable to organized electoral manipulation, gaming the system. Something Democrats excel at as demonstrated by their deceitful harvesting of votes at retirement homes and their unethical campaign ads subversively supporting the most unelectable candidates in Republican Party primaries. In a few cases, RCV might aid a Colorado Republican candidate but it’s no coincidence that its support here is overwhelmingly from those on the left who would love to make our now Democrat one-party state even more so. At least 10 Republican states have already revoked or banned it.