Alaskan voters recently affirmed their loyalty to Ranked Choice Voting, and it seems that this decision has the potential to sway a highly contested Senate seat...due to a split vote between current Senator Dan S. Sullivan (R) and retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan (R) who share similar names. Currently, the vote is projected to be neck and neck between Dan S. and Democratic challenger former Rep. Mary Peltola, with Dan J. grabbing just ~3% of the vote.
However, one Republican interest group filed a complaint with the FEC claiming that Dan J.'s sole purpose in joining the election was to split the Republican vote and bring down Dan S., citing Dan S.'s illegal dealings with ad groups against Dan S. The name confusion is said to be enough to split the Republican vote. However, this is a complaint that rings true with a plurality system of voting like that of Nicaragua, not RCV. Here, the voters leaning towards the imposter Dan J. will almost certainly rank Dan S. as the second option, as a vote for Dan J. seems more like a statement vote than anything more substantial, but yet not enough of a statement to actually vote for a Democrat.
In this sense, those using this situation to press the iron to RCV have little case. Of course, there is an opportunity to have voters rank Dan J, Peltola, Dan S. and actually split the vote, but this seems unlikely and insignificant (I hypothesize that anyone who votes for Dan J. is on the more extreme side of the political spectrum, and as demonstrated by the Hotelling-Downs Model, will not likely vote for Peltola before Dan S.). Perhaps Alaskans should be grateful for such a voting system that removes the incentives of a vote-splitter, as Dan J. running as an independent in our traditional election systems may actually hold sway (perhaps there is variability in voter preference between the election and the runoff to give an edge to Peltola) and avoid producing the Condorcet Winner.
No comments:
Post a Comment