Ranked Choice Voting Is Quietly Advancing!

The good news is that the American people are waking up to the reality of widespread voter fraud and election irregularities, but the bad news is that organizations are already working to quietly implement a new vote counting system that will lead to more ‘uni-party’ moderates winning elections.

While we have to look back and expose the vote fraud that continues to plague our elections and support the courageous Americans like Sidney Powell who are bearing the brunt of attacks for recognizing and exposing the failures and lack of transparency in our elections, we must look ahead to the next threat to free and transparent elections.

Quiet changes are being implemented at some local and even state level elections systems that will make machine fraud and ballot harvesting less necessary… most notably, ranked choice voting (RCV). Ranked choice voting undermines America’s commitment to one-man, one-vote, and to a two-party, primary system that presents voters with philosophically distinct, binary choices in the general election.

We all need to understand RCV and why it erodes election transparency and voter confidence. Below is a summary of ranked choice voting which we are emailing out in two parts.

Please take the time to carefully read this first part (from the Heritage Foundation) and master the concept of ranked choice voting – we will all need to be able to explain the fundamental flaws of RCV to our family and friends going forward.

Ranked Choice Voting Is a Bad Choice

You will not believe what “reformers” have devised to tinker with and manipulate our elections. It is called ranked choice voting (or “instant runoff voting”)—but it is really a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow candidates with marginal support from voters to win elections. Some jurisdictions in the U.S. have already replaced traditional elections with the ranked choice scheme.

Here is how it works. In 2008, instead of choosing to cast your ballot for John McCain, Barack Obama, Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, or Cynthia McKinney, all of whom were running for president, you would vote for all of them and rank your choice. In other words, you would list all five candidates on your ballot from one to five, with one being your first choice for president and five being your last choice.

If none of the candidates were chosen as the number one pick by a majority of voters in Round One, then the presidential candidate with the lowest number of votes would be eliminated from the ballot. People who selected that candidate as their top pick—let us say it was McKinney—would automatically have their votes changed to their second choice. Then the scores would be recalculated, over and over again, until one of the candidates finally won a majority as the second, third, or even fourth choice of voters.

In the end, a voter’s ballot might wind up being cast for the candidate he ranked far below his first choice—a candidate to whom he may have strong political objections and for whom he would not vote in a traditional voting system.

Rigging the System

We do not often agree with former California Governor Jerry Brown Jr. (D), but he was right in 2016 when he vetoed a bill to expand ranked choice voting in his state, saying it was “overly complicated and confusing” and “deprives voters of genuinely informed choice.” Such a system would present many opportunities to rig the electoral system.

Think about what ranked choice voting destroys. It destroys your clear and knowing choices as a political consumer. Let us call it the supermarket contemplation. In reality, you are choosing one elected official to represent you, just like you might choose one type of steak sauce to buy when you are splurging for steaks. At the supermarket you ponder whether to buy A1, Heinz 57, HP, or the really cheap generic brand you have never tried.

In the real world, you compare price, taste, mood, and maybe even the size of the bottle and then decide on your steak sauce. You know nothing about the generic brand, so you rank it last among your choices, while A1 is ranked a distant third. In your mind, it comes down to Heinz or HP, and you choose the Heinz. You buy that bottle and head home to the grill.

Now imagine if, instead, you had to rank-order all the steak sauces—even the ones you dislike—and at checkout the cashier swaps out your bottle of Heinz 57 with the cheap generic you ranked dead last. Why? Well, the majority of shoppers also down-voted it, but there was no clear front-runner, so the generic snuck up from behind with enough down ballot picks to win. In fact, in this ranked choice supermarket, you might even have helped the lousy generic brand win.

Ballot Exhaustion

How could this happen? Because of a phenomenon known as ballot exhaustion. A study published in 2015 that reviewed 600,000 votes cast using ranked choice voting in four local elections in Washington State and California found that “the winner in all four elections receive[d] less than a majority of the total votes cast.”

Going back to our original example of the 2008 presidential election, not all voters are going to rank all five presidential candidates on their ballot. Many voters may only list their top two or three candidates, particularly when there are candidates on the ballot for whom they would never even consider voting.

Thus, if a voter only ranks two of the five candidates and those two are eliminated in the first and second rounds of tabulation, their choices will not be considered in the remaining rounds of tabulation. This ballot exhaustion leads to candidates being elected who were not the first choice of a majority of voters, but only a majority of “all valid votes in the final round of tallying.” Thus, “it is possible that the winning candidate will fall short of an actual majority,” eliminating the “influence [of many voters] over the final outcome.”

Cautionary Examples

Another example of this problem is demonstrated by what happened in Australia (which uses ranked choice voting) in the 2010 election. The liberal Labor Party won the Australian House despite receiving only “38 percent of first-place votes on the initial ballot, while the second-place Liberal-National coalition [the center right choice] captured 43 percent” of first-place votes. In other words, more voters wanted a center-right government than a left-wing government, but ranked choice made sure that did not happen. (Note: This same phenomena happened in the Alaska 2020 Congressional primary when a majority of voters chose one of two Republican candidates on their first ballot, but a Democrat candidate won.)

Or consider the mayor’s race in Oakland, California, in 2010, in which the candidate that received the most first-place votes lost the election to “a candidate on the strength of nearly 25,000 second- and third-place votes” after nine rounds of redistribution of the votes.

This also happened recently in Maine. In 2018, the first-ever general election for federal office in our nation’s history was decided by ranked choice voting in the Second Congressional District in Maine. Jared Golden (D) was declared the eventual winner—even though incumbent Bruce Poliquin (R) received more votes than Golden in the first round. There were two additional candidates in the race, Tiffany Bond and William Hoar. However, the Maine Secretary of State, Matt Dunlop, “exhausted” or threw out a total of 14,076 ballots of voters who had not ranked all of the candidates.

Ranked choice obscures true debates, true issue-driven dialogues between and among candidates, and eliminates genuine binary choices between two top-tier candidates.

Your votes are thrown into a fictional fantasy in which no one knows which candidate is really a substitute for another candidate who may not survive the initial rounds. It is all a numbers gimmick. You, as a voter, are not given the opportunity to make the final decision between competing substitutes.

As Professor James G. Gimpel, an expert on voter behavior, testified in a recent case challenging Maine’s ranked choice voting law, “unlike ordinary elections and ordinary runoffs, voters are required to make predictions about who will be left standing following an initial tabulation of the votes.” He believes that “a portion of the voting public has insufficient interest and information to make a meaningful assessment about likely outcomes.”

Ranked Choice Voting Is a Bad Choice

https://www.heritage.org/node/15437797/print-display

PART II COMING SOON!