With Peltola’s Defeat of Palin, Alaska’s Ranked-Choice Voting Has a Moment

Lee Drutman was quoted in a New York Times article covering ranked-choice voting in Alaska's special election for Congress.

The election reform passed that November, a victory that Ms. Gehl, who donated to and raised money for the Alaska measure, said she saw it as the first step toward her goal of having “final five” voting systems in place in five states by 2024 — “which would mean having 10 senators who have been freed from the tyranny of the party primary.”

Ms. Gehl has worked with groups in two states, Nevada and Missouri, to get similar measures on the ballot this November, which have faced resistance from both parties. In Missouri, Republicans fought against a ranked-choice ballot measure, which in August failed to get enough signatures to make the November ballot.

In Nevada, Ms. Gehl has contributed more than $1 million to a campaign for a similar measure, which has drawn opposition from Democratic officials and lawsuits from prominent Democratic election lawyers, including Marc Elias, the former Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden campaign attorney. But the State Supreme Court ruled in June that the ballot measure could proceed, and it received enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in July. A poll by The Nevada Independent and OH Predictive Insights in August found that respondents supported it by a 15-point margin.

Some political scientists have questioned the idea that it’s the primary system, not the voters, creating polarized politics.

“There’s this good-government, Mugwump reformers’ fantasy that if you have nonpartisan elections, you’ll have these reasonable, rational voters that will emerge and elect reasonable, moderate candidates,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. “But that has never, ever happened.”