JASON SNEAD: Virginia Is No Place For Crazy Voting Experiments

JASON SNEAD: Virginia Is No Place For Crazy Voting Experiments

Jason Snead on June 24, 2023

On Tuesday, ranked-choice voting (RCV) reached the suburbs of the nation’s capital.

In Arlington, Virginia, Democrats used this novel system for a county primary. Tabulation began on Friday, the earliest possible date.

With RCV, that’s the new normal. A well-funded movement is underway aiming to convince voters to fundamentally reshape elections. But Even The Washington Post called Arlington’s election experiment “vexing” and “confusing” — and noted worryingly that “not many people understand how it works.”

Spoiler: that’s the case in all RCV elections.

RCV inherently makes voting much harder and complex. Voters are asked to rank their favorite candidates by preference from first to last.

In present elections, the person with the most votes wins. But with RCV, algorithms are used to compute winners.

If no candidate gets more than 50% of the first-place vote, the lowest-performing candidate is eliminated and votes for that candidate are redistributed based on each voter’s second place pick. That roulette wheel process continues until a candidate wins more than 50% of the remaining vote.

Confused? In Arlington, it got even worse.

When the Arlington Democratic Primary for the County Board used RCV for the first time, voters were asked to rank three out of six candidates to fill two open seats. The process and math used to fill multiple seats is so complicated, even election experts had difficulty tracking it.

Arlington NAACP President Mike Hemminger said the introduction of RCV has prompted, “a series of grave concerns from our community” and will require his organization to work to ensure “no one’s foundational right to vote becomes disenfranchised or impeded.”

Virginia Democrats not only changed the law to allow for RCV in certain elections but also chose to accept ballots up to three days late. That’s a big problem because RCV tabulation cannot begin until all ballots are received since each vote can profoundly change the election results.

Imagine this nightmare on a national scale. After nearly every election, the recounts, lawsuits and legal appeals would be endless.

Flaws surrounding RCV are many. During the process of elimination under RCV, a candidate in the lead can easily lose the election. Republican Congressman Bruce Poliquin lost his election in Maine’s first RCV election even though he won the most first-place votes.

Under RCV, your vote can be tossed out during the elimination process. Ballots that are considered exhausted get thrown out in each round of elimination.

With each elimination round, there are fewer and fewer “voters” included in the process. 140,000 votes were eliminated in New York City’s Democratic Mayoral Primary in 2021. In Alaska, 11,000 votes were eliminated in a 2022 special congressional race.

In Oakland, California last year, a tabulation mistake led to the wrong winner being certified. Counted correctly, the person who came in third place actually won and had to sue to take his seat on the school board.

Why are Arlington and other localities using this system? There is a concerted national push to adopt RCV, backed up by the Left’s biggest dark money donors and deep-pocketed special interests including Arabella Advisors’ network, George Soros and more.

It is the same network that backs the left’s other attempts to skew voting for partisan gain, whether it be endless left-wing lawsuits to rewrite state voting laws the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence’s behind-the-scenes efforts to pump left-wing politics into election offices. These networks even receive huge sums from Hansjorg Wyss, a foreign billionaire spending hundreds of millions to influence American politics and elections.

RCV proponents often focus on allowing for a “local option” just like in Virginia, before pushing to bring RCV statewide. And when legislatures decline to do so, out-of-state left-wing dark money pours in to push ballot measures instead.

RCV’s end goal is to eliminate party primaries and upend the entire democratic process. By weakening political parties, RCV creates a power vacuum that Arabella and Soros are ready to fill. They have the funding, resources and infrastructure to do it.

In other words, left-wing elites are buying a new election system, one that will push politics to the left and make our system more responsive to them, not the voters. And it’s all part of the left’s ongoing push to reshape voting itself for partisan gain.

There is a better way forward, one that is truly better for the voters and for elections: ban ranked-choice voting.

Three states passed bans this year, joining Florida and Tennessee. Americans just want it to be easy to vote and hard to cheat. The Arlington election shows that RCV just makes voting harder, more complicated and wide open for lawsuits.

Jason Snead is executive director of Honest Elections Project Action, a nonpartisan group supporting free and honest elections.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.