Alaska's Governor Dunleavy Speaks Out Against Ranked Choice Voting

I've been speaking and writing against ranked-choice voting (RCV) for some time now. Alaska is one of two states (the other being Maine) that use RCV for statewide elections. I said it was a bad idea when Ballot Initiative 2 passed in 2020, making RCV Alaska's system. I said it was a bad idea after the 2022 and 2024 elections. I say it's a bad idea now. It's unnecessarily complicated, confusing, and it flies in the face of the principle of "one man, one vote."

Alaskans should, if all goes well, have a chance to repeal RCV again in the 2026 election. In 2024, the repeal missed by less than a thousand votes, and that was after the pro-repeal side was outspent 10 to 1, mostly by money from Outside. The pro-repeal side has one powerful supporter, too: In a guest column at Must Read Alaska on Tuesday, Alaska's Republican Governor, Mike Dunleavy, made some excellent arguments against this bad idea.

In recent years, we’ve seen several changes to our state’s election system, including the adoption of ranked-choice voting (RCV) following the passage of Ballot Measure 2 in 2020. I want to speak plainly with you today about where I stand on this issue and why I believe Alaska should return to the traditional method of voting that served our state well for decades.
Let me start by acknowledging a simple fact: I have been elected governor under both systems. I won under the traditional voting method in 2018 and again under ranked-choice voting in 2022. So, my position on this issue is not about political gain or loss. It is about trust, clarity, and confidence in our electoral process.
Ranked-choice voting was pitched as a reform to solve a problem that, frankly, didn’t exist in Alaska. We were told it would reduce partisanship, promote consensus candidates, and make elections more fair. In reality, what we got was a system that confused voters, made outcomes less transparent, and created deep concerns about how votes are tabulated and who ultimately decides an election.

I've seen this confusion for myself. In 2022, when the RCV system was in place, in our local polling place, I witnessed several people, most but not all older folks, claiming "I'm not ranking anything, I'm just voting once for (candidate) and that's it." It was sad and disillusioning, but it's a fact. Also in 2022, because of this ill-advised system, it was weeks before we knew the outcome of the election. Alaska, in 2022, mind, had a little over 267,000 voters casting ballots. By way of contrast, Florida, with over eight million voters, knew its results much more quickly,

Latest Polls: Could Mary Peltola Be Alaska's Next Governor? RCV May Tip Things Her Way.

Governor Dunleavy goes on:

We should never make our elections more complicated than they need to be. Let’s remember what elections are fundamentally about: expressing the will of the people. That requires clarity, confidence, and transparency. The traditional voting system delivered that for decades in Alaska. Ranked-choice voting has not.
It is time to bring back a system that puts the voter first. One person, one vote. The candidate with the most votes wins. That’s how our democracy was designed to work. That’s how Alaskans expect it to work. And that’s the system I will support going forward.

That's the system, we hope, that a majority of Alaskans will vote to bring back in 2026. RCV is the system that gave Alaska a term of Democrat Mary Peltola in the House of Representatives. That state of affairs ended when the Alaska Republicans coalesced behind one candidate, that being Nick Begich III, who serves now as Alaska's at-large representative, and who proved with his win that RCV doesn't have to be a silver bullet for Democrats.

Governor Dunleavy is nonetheless correct. This is a bad system. It needs to be voted out in 2026. One voter, one vote.

Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.

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