Democrat Mary Peltola's win in Alaska's first ranked choice voting election was a win for democracy in several important ways. It is important to note that she would probably have won anyway using Alaska's traditional way of voting, because she came out on top in the first round of voting, with 40.2% of the vote versus 31.3% for Republican Sarah Palin and 28.5% for Republican Nick Begich. The problem with the old way of voting is that any claim by Mary to represent "most" Alaskans would forever be undermined by her winning election with only 40% of the votes. (Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-alaska-tells-us-about-november/ )
Without a second round of voting, the knee-jerk assumption to make about the partisan leaning of the nearly 60% of the electorate that voted for Palin and Begich is that they would be uniformly opposed to electing a Democratic representative.
The second round of voting, after redistributing Nick Begich's voters in accordance with their second choice of candidate, did show as expected that a (bare) majority (50.3%) of Begich's voters preferred the remaining Republican candidate as their second choice. However, more than a quarter (28.7%) of Begich's (mostly Republican) voters indicated Democrat Peltola as their preferred second choice candidate and another 20.9% were so unhappy with the remaining candidates that they refused to indicate any second choice preference. After the 20.9% "lost" votes were removed, the final outcome was 51.5% for Peltola and 48.5% for Palin. (source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-alaska-tells-us-about-november/ )
Garnering a clear majority of the remaining votes legitimized Peltola as a representative of "most" Alaskans. Moreover, Peltola's ability to siphon away more than a quarter of Begich's voters laid bare the fracture in the Republican party between traditional Republicans and MAGA Republicans, adding a level of nuance to political pundits' otherwise Manichean tendency to amplify the political polarity between conservatives and liberals to the point where it is a caricature rather than reality.
The feature that I like the most about ranked choice voting is the pressure it puts on frontrunner candidates to be nice to and respectful of candidates with more modest-sized political bases. This was ironically illustrated by what happened to MAGA candidate Sarah when she waged a scorched earth campaign against her fellow Republican, Nick Begich. (source: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120327126/palin-peltola-begich-alaska-special-house-election-results )
Her political calculus was that Alaska was such a Republican-leaning state that if she could defeat Begich, the vast majority of his (mostly Republican) voters would choose her as their second choice, elevating her total electoral support to exceed that of Democrat Peltola's support, which was not expected to grow much from what she achieved in the first round of voting. MAGA politicians' tendency to demonize political opponents and assassinate their character tends to alienate the supporters of their opponents. In a top-vote-getter winner takes all system, this scorched earth strategy has worked well politically but in a ranked choice voting environment, gratuitously alienating the supporters of a soon-to-be defeated political opponent results in significant cross-party voting or a refusal by the erstwhile Republican voters to participate in the second round of voting. Palin's alienation of Begich's supporters doomed her well-financed effort to return to political relevance.
In the ranked choice voting environment, minority party candidates get treated more respectfully by both the press and by the majority party candidates, because the majority party candidates need the voters of the minority party candidates to vote for them, if they are to attract more than 50% of the votes in the final round of voting. This heightened respect helps give voice to communities like native Alaskans who historically have had preciously little political influence on Alaskan politics. Thanks to ranked choice voting, Alaska politicians will now be more motivated to be attentive to the needs of native Alaskans voters if they are to surpass the 50% of the electorate threshold required to win election. Thanks to ranked choice voting, native Alaskans can now participate more actively as candidates and not be laughed off the stage as being hopelessly irrelevant to political outcomes.
Ranked choice voting is more democratic and more fully informative of where constituents stand with respect to major election issues than more traditional voting approaches. For the sake of our democracy, I hope that more states follow the lead of Maine and Alaska in adopting ranked choice voting as the way for the people to express their political preferences and to elect representatives who best reflect those preferences.
