Alaska Constitution Party

Forget about election fraud, dead people voting, electronic voting, or mail-in balloting, this article from Ballot Access News examines the work of an Ohio State University Law Professor which shows that changing the way votes are counted in a Ranked Choice system, such as Alaska, can actually change the outcome of an election. The Alaska Constitution Party supports the return to Alaska's original election system of One Vote, One Person, At the Polls Voting.  

Originally published at Ballot Access News on 3 June 2023 by Bill Redpath.

Edward B. Foley, a Professor of Law at The Ohio State University, recently posted on Election Law Blog a proposal for “Total Vote Runoff” (“TVR”), which is like Single Winner RCV, except for the vote transfer methodology. Instead of using only first place (and transferred first place) votes to decide which candidates are eliminated, he proposes calculating each remaining candidate’s “Total Votes” score using Borda count, then eliminating the candidate with the lowest Total Vote score before votes are transferred to each voter’s next choice candidate. This continues until one candidate has a majority of votes.

For example, in a four candidate election with a single winner, if no candidate received a majority of first choice votes, the candidate with the fewest first choice votes would not necessarily be eliminated, as is the case with standard single winner RCV. Instead, a Total Votes score would be calculated for each candidate using the following formula:

(3 x # of first choice votes) + (2 x # of second choice votes) + (1 x # of third choice votes) + (0 x # of fourth choice votes).

Therefore, each voter would be allocating six (3+2+1) Total Vote score points among all four candidates. If a voter did not rank all four candidates, the unused points would be evenly split among the unranked candidates, including fractional points.

The candidate with the lowest Total Votes score would be eliminated, with each affected voter’s vote then transferred to their next choice candidate.

This process would continue with three or two remaining candidates until someone had a majority of votes or had more votes if only two candidates remain.

Mr. Foley argues that there is a greater chance of a single winner candidate having majority support with the TVR methodology than with the standard RCV vote transfer process. He cites evidence from the August 2022 US House election in Alaska that “non-MAGA” Republican candidate Nick Begich was probably more popular with voters than Representative-elect Mary Peltola, but had fewer first choice votes than Sarah Palin, and was therefore eliminated first in the three-way race using the standard RCV vote transfer process.

His close to finished draft article on TVR, soon to be published in the University of New Hampshire Law Review, can be read here:  SSRN-id4328946 (1)