Last week in Colorado, Ballot Initiative 310 qualified for November's ballot.  If approved, “it would change most of Colorado’s primaries so candidates from all parties run against each other, followed by a ranked choice voting general election.” 

USA Today published an article that listed “18 states that allow ranked choice voting [RCV] in some capacity,” in which it tried to explain the most common form of RCV, called “instant runoff voting”:

• Scenario one: One candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes and is declared the winner.
• Scenario two: There is no majority winner.  The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated along with his first-preference votes.  The counting restarts and moves the second-preference votes to first-preference.  This process repeats until a candidate wins a majority.

If Scenario Two is not 100% clear, you are encouraged to consult Ballotpedia — the alpha and the omega of all things ranked choice voting.  For example, that link references (with an animation, no less!) the 2022 Alaska House of Representative special election, where after two rounds of RCV, Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin and Nick Begich.

The WSJ’s Kimberly Strassel expresses a distinctly scathing impression of that election in her Op-ed entitled “The Ranked Choice Scam”:

It [RCV] forces voters to play its complex game [of ranking multiple candidates] or risk not being counted. Alaska is a Republican state, and two of the three candidates who advanced — Sarah Palin and Nick Begich Jr. — are Republicans. They split the vote in the first round of counting, giving Democrat Mary Peltola more votes than Ms. Palin. Mr. Begich was then eliminated. Half his voters went to Ms. Palin. Only about a quarter went to Ms. Peltola, but it was enough to push her over 50% of those who ranked either her or Ms. Palin. Yet notice the numbers don’t add up. About 20% of Mr. Begich’s supporters didn’t put a second choice — either in confusion or protest. (A full 35% of Palin voters didn’t.) Those voters didn’t want Ms. Peltola — they wouldn’t mark her name — but for refusing to play the game, their punishment was to be stuck with her anyway. Thus does a state that Donald Trump won by 10 points, and in which 60% of the voters chose first a Republican, end up with a Democratic representative. Consensus? Hardly. The word is “rigged”.

The Democrat left has been grinding away, spreading RCV throughout the country.  As Ms. Strassel explains:

Two years ago, left-leaning outside groups quietly funded Alaska liberals (posing under the vanilla title Alaskans for Better Elections) backing a ballot initiative to do away with the state’s perfectly good election system. It was replaced with a “top four” primary and a ranked-choice general election. Most Alaskans didn’t know what they were voting for, since the initiative was a mind-numbing 25 pages of single type, and its boosters tucked the voting part into the garble. The initiative instead led with a provision claiming it would eliminate “dark money” (doubly offensive given its own cloaked funding). Even with all this subterfuge, it barely passed.

That “top four” terminology for primaries is especially pernicious: under RCV, primary elections are open to any and all; there is no guarantee that a candidate from each of the two major political parties will make the cut to the general election.  The third time is the charm for quoting Ms. Strassel:

The state [Alaska] got its unexpected first interaction with this regime when Rep. Don Young died in March. The ensuing special “open” primary featured 48 candidates, running as Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, independents, “nonpartisans,” “undeclared” and (no joke) Santa Claus. All this “choice” served only to deny Alaskans useful information about any one candidate. Choice becomes malevolent when it eliminates meaningful debate, denies voters information, and lards ballots with no-hope candidates that distract from serious ones.

The proponents of RCV trumpet liberation from the shackles of two-party politics, more diverse candidates, increased civility among candidates, more voters voting, and less money spent by states and local governments through the elimination of additional rounds of voting.  That last argument is from the website of FairVote.org, which is a good source for pleasant-sounding platitudes, obscurations, technocratic complexities, prevarications, and outright mendacities, all in the service of ranked choice voting.

In Colorado — aka California East in some circles — ranked choice voting is just another tactic to enshrine Democrat oligarchic rule.  Will Colorado voters take yet another blue pill without asking what’s in it?

Image via Raw Pixel.