AK Ballot: Alaska voters made history in 2020 when they made their state the first in the nation to adopt a top-four primary, but conservatives tell the Alaska Beacon's James Brooks that they're close to qualifying a measure to repeal the system that would go before voters next year.
The campaign has until the start of the January legislative session to turn in about 27,000 valid signatures, a figure that represents 10% of the total number of votes that were cast in the most recent general election, and it must also hit certain targets in three-quarters of Alaska's 40 state House districts. One leader says that organizers have already gathered 30,000 petitions so far but will analyze them later to see if more are needed.
Under the current top-four system, all the candidates run on one primary ballot, and the four contenders with the most votes—regardless of party—advance to an instant-runoff general election. This method was first used last year in the special election to succeed the late GOP Rep. Don Young as Alaska's lone House member, a contest that ultimately saw Democrat Mary Peltola defeat Republican Sarah Palin 51-49.
Conservatives both in Alaska and across the country were furious because Palin and another Republican, Nick Begich, outpaced Peltola by a combined 59-40 in the first round of tabulations. They blamed their surprise loss on instant-runoff voting rather than Palin's many failings or the Democrat's strengths.
"60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican," griped Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, "but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion—which disenfranchises voters—a Democrat 'won.'" But even without ranked-choice voting, Peltola still would have come in first, as she beat Palin 40-31 in the first round.
And a poll conducted right after the special by supporters of ranked-choice voting showed that Alaskans saw their new voting system as anything but "convoluted." Instead, 85% of respondents found it to be "simple," while 62% said they supported the new method.
Hard-right groups, though, soon had even more reasons to hate the new status quo. Thanks to the top-four system, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a rare Republican who's crossed party lines on high-profile votes, would no longer face what would almost certainly have been a tough GOP primary against Donald Trump's preferred candidate, former state cabinet official Kelly Tshibaka. (Murkowski famously lost her 2010 primary to a conservative foe but won the general through a write-in effort.)
Instead, Murkowski and Tshibaka easily advanced to the general election with Democrat Pat Chesbro and a little-known third Republican. Murkowski led Tshibaka 43.4-42.6 in the first round of general election tabulations, but the 10% of voters who supported Chesbro overwhelmingly broke for the incumbent and helped lift her to a 54-46 victory. Peltola also won her rematch with Palin 55-45 after initially leading her 49-26; unsurprisingly, both Palin and Tshibaka ardently back the effort to end the top-four.