Ranked-choice assures all voters are heard

I was surprised when a recent reader claimed that ranked-choice voting is designed to help Democrats. He referenced an Alaskan senator who claims RCV favors Democrats in Republican-leaning populations and cited Capital Research Center's (website fundraising tagline: Let's Expose and Defeat the Left!) claim that RCV is being driven by leftists. A few clicks to search out data-based findings was helpful. Turns out that claiming RCV favors Democrats is akin to saying arithmetic favors even numbers. RCV is designed to ensure the winner is the choice of the majority of voters. Period.

As a voter, I can check my first choice, second choice, etc. If no candidate gets a majority of voters' first choices, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated. If my candidate loses, my second choice is assigned to my vote and all votes are retallied. If there is no majority winner, the process is repeated until there is a winner.

Alaska is a good example. RCV was adopted there in 2020 as the result of a statewide referendum. In the 2022 election for U.S. representative, Mary Peltola, a Democrat, got 49% of first place votes. She eventually won against Sarah Palin, a Republican, because there were sufficient voters for Nick Begich, a Republican, who preferred Peltola to Palin as their second choice when he was eliminated in the final round.

And contrary to the claim that RCV is an "unnecessarily complicated process that produces "weary, confused and invalidated voters," exit polls showed 85% of Alaskan voters reported RCV to be "simple."

I invite fellow readers to look into these claims (mine included) for themselves. Another thing that jumped out in my research is that both Democrat and Republican politicians have been against RCV. And it has been the citizenry who is for it.

Randy Lewis

Deer Park