https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/2957752/the-lefts-latest-scheme-to-permanently-change-elections-in-america/The Left’s latest scheme to permanently change elections in AmericaApril 9, 2024
Paul Teller & Jason Snead
Imagine a Super Bowl referee bending the rules to give his favorite team the win. Few would call that fair. Yet that is precisely what the Left wants to do to America’s elections. From noncitizen voting to lawsuits inviting activist judges to rewrite our election laws, left-wing activists are taking every opportunity to change elections permanently for partisan gain.
Their latest tactic is to undermine the basic principle of “one person, one vote” with a new scheme called ranked choice voting.
As we speak, liberal special interests are leading a sophisticated national campaign to push ranked choice voting in nearly every state. They have hired lobbyists, formed astroturf activist groups, and are financing state ballot measures across the country. This year alone, more than a half-dozen states, including battlegrounds such as Arizona and Nevada, are facing initiatives to change their elections with ranked choice voting.
Ranked choice voting’s proponents cloak it in deliberately misleading messaging. Advocates say it “makes elections more fair and more democratic.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, ranked choice voting makes voting harder and puts the public’s trust in elections in jeopardy.
The most common form of ranked choice voting being pushed nationwide is called “Final Five Voting,” and it is designed to upend elections in two fundamental ways. First, it replaces party primaries with California-style jungle primaries in which all candidates compete in a single contest. That means no more Republican and Democratic nominees and no guarantee that voters will have a choice between the two parties in November.
Then, for the general election, voters must rank up to five candidates in each ranked choice voting race. In federal election years, ballots typically feature a dozen or more major races. That means voters must wade through and carefully rank 60 or more candidates each election.
It only gets more complicated from there. If no candidate wins a majority of the vote, ranked choice voting manufactures one. Tabulators strike the candidate with the fewest first-place votes and redistribute his or her ballots to each voter’s next-highest choice. These elimination rounds continue until someone (often the person who initially came in second or even third place) wins a majority of the remaining votes. Needless to say, the ranked choice voting process takes much longer to tabulate, leading to delayed results, recounts, and frustrated voters.
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