Some on the right are flirting with a voting method that the left likes
For example, the political right has railed against the 2022 Senate elections in Alaska, where Republican incumbent Lisa Murkowski, a moderate, trailed a more conservative challenger. Kelly Tshibaka, in the polls leading up to the elections. However, Ms. Murkowski achieved a victory by achieving second place in the rankings of the 10 percent of voters who cast their ballots with the sole Democratic candidate as their first choice.
Even many moderate conservatives argue that the system doesn't really reflect the will of the voters. “Ranked voting is when you want to send in the second best,” said Anthony M. Amore, a once moderate Republican, now a registered independent, who helped mount a successful campaign defeating a ranked choice voting initiative in Massachusetts in 2020. “It's not the person who got the most votes. It's a distortion of that.”
Yet, ranked choice has still progressed. Proposals in Nevada, Colorado and Idaho would eliminate party primaries in favor of a single primary open to all; the top four finishers (or, in Nevada, five) would advance to the general election.
Such last-four and last-five systems are steadily gaining popularity – perhaps in part because a wealthy Chicago businesswoman who helped pioneer the concept Katherine Gehl, has spent millions promoting it in referendum elections. (She's not alone; other wealthy patrons of ranked choice campaigns include Kathryn Murdochthe daughter-in-law of Rupert Murdoch, and Kenneth C. Griffin, a hedge fund executive who among the top donors of Republican Party candidates.)
But Mr. Pudner, Wisconsin's election rules watchdog, said concerns about democracy, not money, drive people of diverse ideological backgrounds to support ranked choice. In Wisconsin, ranked choice proponents make the point that only one in five people say they approve of Congress's performance in surveys — but members of Congress seeking reelection win their races more than nine times out of 10.
“It doesn't work,” he said. “We do have common ground there.”
Kirsten Noyes, Susan C. Beachy And Kitty Bennett research contributed.