Next month Alaskans will participate in the second open primary under the ranked-choice system approved by voters in 2020. Groups calling them themselves Alaskans for Honest Elections and Alaskans for Honest Government hope it will be our last. But of all the reasons they oppose it, they primarily object to the way it gives every eligible voter an equal opportunity to participate in nominating candidates for the general election.
In other words, they want to give control back to the two parties that have left us with the choice of re-electing an 81-year-old incumbent president or the 78-year-old, twice-impeached loser who still refuses to accept the results of the last election.
Now I understand keeping or repealing ranked choice won’t affect national elections. But the way state parties across the country are standing behind these candidates tells us they’re rotten to the core too.
Alaskans for Honest Elections began working on an initiative to repeal ranked choice almost immediately after the 2022 election. Art Mathias is one of the main organizers of the effort. He’s president of Wellspring Ministries in Anchorage, which claims to be “based totally upon the teachings of Biblical Scripture.” And he founded the Ranked Choice Education Association, which is misleading registered as a nonprofit religious organization in Washington State.
All three were subjects of a complaint filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission. In January they were fined over $90,000 for inaccurate reporting of contributions and expenditures.
Apparently, Mathias doesn’t value honesty as implied by the names and missions of his organizations. But pending the outcomes of a lawsuit challenging the Division of Elections certification of their petition, he may still succeed in getting his repeal initiative on the ballot.
In 2022, he and many others weren’t at all pleased when Republican candidates Kelly Tshibaka and Sarah Palin lost their races to represent Alaska in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. They aren’t wrong to believe that both women would have won a closed primary. Then, being the only Republicans left in the race, they probably would have prevailed in the general election too.
But they refuse to consider the possibility that among the four candidates on the ranked-choice ballot, Tshibaka and Palin were viewed unfavorably by too many Alaskans.
As everyone knows, it was Sen. Lisa Murkowski who beat Tshibaka. Like most Americans, she’s been very troubled by the way President Joe Biden and Donald Trump waltzed their way to becoming their party’s presumptive nominees. Considering how the United Kingdom and France held elections last week that had been called for only six to eight weeks ago, it’s a disgrace that our long, drawn-out process produced nothing better.
Another thing that needs to be fixed is the Electoral College. It has the effect of making voters in swing states more important than the rest of us. In the early 1970s, Congress came close to passing a constitutional amendment that would have abolished it. Had the amendment passed, enough states were prepared to ratify it. But six senators used an undemocratic filibuster to kill it.
Without the Electoral College, Trump would have lost in 2016. But even if he won, there’s a solid argument for why his crying fraud scheme to reverse the last election would have been rejected without a single court challenge.
Congress did pass the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act in 2022 in response to Trump’s attempt to obstruct their certification of the Electoral College vote. But because it effectively put his actions in a negative light, 200 House Republicans and 29 Republican senators, including Dan Sullivan, voted against it.
For eight years too many congressional Republicans have refrained from revealing their true opinions about Trump’s willful ignorance and other character flaws. Now we’re seeing Democrats doing that regarding the age-related concerns plaguing Biden’s campaign.
In the same vein, neither party is about to admit that the primary system they control serves the country poorly. So it’s unlikely they’ll take the initiative to fix it.
But they might eventually get the message if enough states implement solutions like Alaska’s open primaries and ranked choice. And we shouldn’t be fooled into repealing it by those who want to put the parties back in charge.
Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.