The system, first approved by voters in 2020, quickly drew Republican opposition after a Democrat flipped the state’s single U.S. House seat in 2022, the first time it was used. But the state’s predominantly Native areas formed a bulwark to defend it this fall, despite notorious barriers to political participation in these more rural and remote regions.

The measure to repeal the system trails by 664 votes, or 0.21 percent, with all ballots counted. The small margin means that proponents of repeal may ask for a recount in December, though no statewide recount has changed a lead of this size in this century. 

Areas with large Alaska Native populations provided the winning margin against repeal. Across the state’s three majority-Native House districts, the ‘no’ vote is leading by 2,960 votes, 64 to 36 percent. 

“This is definitely demonstrating the power of us as a block,” said Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote. “We tend to scream into the void that we count, that we matter. If we vote to our full power, which is a quarter of the statewide vote, then we would see a lot more of a representative government.”

Alaska Native organizers rallied to defeat Measure 2, Bolts reported in September, and they worked to educate people on how the new system works. 

The Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN) formally endorsed the open primary and ranked-choice voting system last year at its annual convention, saying that the new rules afford Native voters “more freedom, more choice, more influence, and greater participation.” They reaffirmed their support at their convention in October, right before the Nov. 5 referendum.

In the lead-up to Election Day, Native leaders worked to grow turnout by hosting events in dozens of rural villages, spreading the word through radio, and recruiting young people to volunteer at the polls. They also closely monitored each precinct to get ahead of logistical challenges that come up in remote areas, from a lack of equipment to winter storms.

In Alaska’s new system, all candidates regardless of party run in one primary that is open to all voters. Then, the top four candidates advance to the general election, at which stage voters can rank them. The state then tabulates the ballots and rankings until one winner emerges. 

Native organizers told Bolts that they saw the first half of this reform—the open primary—as the most valuable to their aims. Under the old system, major parties acted as “gatekeepers,” and candidates had little hope of prevailing without winning their support and approval, Sparck said. But now, voters can pick whoever aligns best with their needs, regardless of party affiliation. The priorities of Native voters rarely fall squarely into the platform of any one party, she added, and the open primary system allows them to support candidates across party lines.

Data suggests that Natives have embraced this option more than other Alaskans. According to a report by Get Out the Native Vote, over 80 percent of voters in predominantly Native districts split their primary ballots in the 2022 primary, choosing some Republican candidates and some Democratic candidates. That is a far higher rate than the state at-large, where half of voters split their ballots.

Many also credited the new system for contributing to the historic election of Mary Peltola, who won a competitive race in 2022 to become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.

But Peltola lost this month to Republican challenger Nick Begich. Begich already led Pelota as voters’ first preference by two percentage points. Once the state tabulated the ranked preferences of voters who supported minor candidates on Wednesday, Begich gained more ground. He prevailed 51.3 to 48.7 percent.

FairVote, a national organization that promotes ranked-choice voting, pointed to the results on Wednesday to make the case that the system does not favor any one party. Begich’s win, two years after Peltola’s victory, is “a reminder that the reform is completely party-neutral,” Meredith Sumpter, the president of FairVote, said in a statement.

If the result holds, the failure of Measure 2 may have significant repercussions on state politics: By preserving open primaries, it would signal that Republican officials do not need to worry about surviving a partisan GOP primary in 2026 or 2028. Lisa Murkowsi, the moderate U.S. senator, benefited from the new system in her last reelection race in 2022. In the legislature, Democrats and moderate Republicans have formed a coalition to run both chambers; they hope to attract more Republicans now that open primaries appear to be here to stay.

The outcome of Measure 2 in Alaska stands in stark contrast with the Nov. 5 results in much of the country. Measures to adopt open primaries and ranked-choice voting failed this fall in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon. (Nevadans had approved the measure in 2022, but it needed to pass twice to become law.) Plus, Missouri voters banned localities from using it. 

Alaska will remain one of only two states with ranked-choice voting, alongside Maine. It will be the only state with an open primary system, since Maine still uses partisan primaries.

Voters in Washington, D.C., also approved a switch to ranked-choice voting on Nov. 5. Cities including Portland, San Francisco, and Minneapolis already use it in their local races.

In Alaska, the ‘no’ campaign to preserve the current system was led by Alaskans for Better Elections, and it massively outraised and outspent supporters of repeal. 

Philip Izon, who led the effort to get Measure 2 on the ballot, did not reply to a request for comment on its defeat. In an interview this summer, he criticized the ‘no’ campaign for being funded by out-of-state groups, such as the Colorado-based group Unite America PAC and the Texas-based Act Now Initiative. He also told Bolts that he had formed Alaskans for Honest Elections, the group that organized the citizens initiative, because the ranked-choice system was so confusing that his grandfather wasn’t able to figure out how to cast his ballot. He faulted the system as a way to tip the scales towards Democrats.

The ‘no’ to Measure 2 did well in Anchorage and in the southern tip of the state. These are areas that tend to be friendlier to Democrats. But it drew support beyond Democratic voters and outpaced Kamala Harris’ share of the vote in the presidential race by nearly 9 percentage points statewide.

The gap between the ‘no’ and Harris was greatest in areas with large Native populations. Four of the six legislative districts where the ‘no’ vote outperformed Harris by the largest margin are the state’s four majority- and plurality-Native districts. That suggests the results in those regions can’t just be reduced to partisanship. 

In Alaska’s majority-Native 40th House district, the ‘no’ did 19 percentage points better than Harris. Voters there voted against repeal 61 to 39 percent, even as Harris lost to Republican Donald Trump 51 to 42 percent.

The ‘no’ also prevailed with more than 60 percent of the vote in the 38th and 39th districts, the state’s two other majority-Native districts. 

These districts are part of the Bush, a region with harsh weather and large distances between isolated villages and polling places that can discourage potential voters and make organizing difficult. 

The region has a history of disenfranchisement. The state often does a poor job of ensuring people have access to the ballot and some communities lack proper accommodations for voting information and ballots in their languages, despite those protections being guaranteed by the Voting Rights Act.

Native organizers this fall made a mammoth effort in order to ensure that registered voters in remote villages disconnected from roadways could still participate in the election.

Sparck told Bolts that, in the small village of Newtok in western Alaska, voters were caught off guard when they learned just before Election Day that the state had no plan to set up a polling place, even though it was a designated precinct and there had been one there in past elections. There are no roads connecting Newtok to any other polling places; the nearest location would have been across the Ningliq River, which was frozen and impassable by boat. The village also has no post office, ruling out mail voting as a solution.

Newtok is a coastal village that has begun collapsing into the ocean due to rising tides brought on by climate change. Most residents have abandoned Newtok and moved to a nearby village across the river, but dozens have yet to relocate. 

“They assumed that Newtok didn’t exist anymore, without realizing there were still voters in town,” Sparck said. “Those folks would have been completely left out of the entire process. As difficult as it was, we were able to salvage some level of voting. The system was not prepared to work with a region like that.” 

The window of opportunity was slim: A powerful storm was rolling in that would shut down air travel for a week. Jackie Boyer, a volunteer with the Mobilization Center’s Rural and Indigenous Outreach Program, a private organization, flew on a small plane to the village the day before the election to help find a way for Newtok residents to vote. She worked with the Alaska Division of Elections to request a vote-by-fax process and then spent hours setting up a printer for the ballots and troubleshooting connectivity issues. 

She sent out messages through the VHF radio system that most households in the Bush rely on to inform the community that they would be able to cast their votes.

Fifty-five people ended up voting on Measure 2 in the Newtok precinct, which also includes another village across the river. The ‘no’ won handily: 18 people voted in favor of repealing open primaries and ranked-choice voting, while 37 people voted against it. 

“We’ve dealt with issues like this in multiple years. And as climate change furthers and storms become more prevalent, there are more delays with mail and with planes coming in,” said Boyer. “It highlights the unique nature of Alaska and voting in rural areas. It takes a community to get this done.”

The post Powered by Native Voters, Ranked-Choice Voting and Open Primaries Survive in Alaska appeared first on Bolts.

It was just four years ago that voters approved the switch to this new way of running elections. But Republicans have lashed out against the change ever since Democrat Mary Peltola won the first election held under the new rules in 2022, flipping Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat. This also made Peltola the first Alaska Native to join Congress.

Alaskans for Honest Elections, an organization founded in early 2023 in opposition to ranked-choice voting, put an initiative on the ballot this fall to turn back the clock. If Measure 2 passes in November, it would end Alaska’s novel system, under which the state holds an open primary, with all candidates running on one ballot regardless of party, and then the top four candidates face off in a ranked-choice general election. Instead, the state would return to a more conventional approach: partisan primaries, followed by a first-past-the-post election. 

Alaska Native leaders are now working to consolidate support for the open primary and ranked-choice voting system. The state’s largest tribal organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), formally endorsed the new rules last year at its annual convention.

The AFN adopted a resolution that said the system better represents Native voters by allowing “more freedom, more choice, more influence, and greater participation.”

AFN members have since launched a coordinated campaign to persuade voters to oppose Measure 2. Native leaders say they’ll be reaching people through public radio, local newspapers and pop-up events in rural areas. 

“No system is going to be perfect. Ranked-choice voting gets us closer to something that is equitable,” said Barbara ‘Wáahlaal Gidaag Blake, an elected board member of the Sealaska Corporation, one of Alaska’s regional organizations that manages Indigenous land claims.

Proponents of the 2020 reform are making the case that most Native voters in Alaska are not registered with a party, and that the open primary system is more inclusive for independent voters, helping energize disaffected voters. “Alaskans should be able to choose a person, not a political party, and trust that the process will encourage good public policy,” says the AFN’s resolution.

For Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote, an organization affiliated with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council that promotes turnout in Native communities, the change to the elections system opens up the field to lesser known candidates. “Anybody can run,” she told Bolts. “You don’t have to have the party’s blessing and backing, and that does change things a lot. You have more unique and representative people on that ballot than we have ever seen before.” 

“And a lot of them look like us, and that was exciting too,” added Sparck, who is a member of Chevak’s Qissunamiut Tribe.

The mistrust many Alaska Natives feel towards the political system extends far beyond the exact mechanics of voting. But to Native groups that support the change, the new voting system has been a step towards repairing past harms by bolstering Native representation, and they’re frustrated to see that the state may roll back a reform they believe has worked in their favor.

A long history of voter suppression and gerrymandering, familiar to Indigenous populations throughout the United States, have dampened Alaska Natives’ political power. The geography of the land presents logistical challenges as well. Many Natives live in villages spread across the vast Alaskan Bush, disconnected from major roadways and separated from regional hubs by the rugged landscape that can only be traversed by small plane or by boat. Election administration in the region regularly falls short. There are also at least 20 distinct language groups among Alaska Natives, an additional challenge for political campaigns and organizers.

The federal Voting Rights Act requires that election communications in some parts of the state be conducted in at least one Native language so voters know how to vote, and understand what is on the ballot, but this is often not implemented well. Speakers of Yup’ik, the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in Alaska, sued the state in 2013 with the backing of Native rights groups for failing to provide language assistance. A federal judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2014, and a settlement agreement required Alaska to improve language accessibility. 

But Native rights groups say the state never fully complied with the court order, and the settlement was extended through 2026. “There’s off-and-on legal battles over access to polling stations, and about having voter pamphlets in languages that we can understand since English is not the first language everywhere, and it is a journey just to get to the capitol for most folks,” said Joe Nelson, the co-chair of the AFN.

For Blake, those electoral difficulties magnify the disillusionment that many Alaska Natives have towards a political system that has continuously exploited their resources, lands and communities.

“There are inequities and biases built into every aspect of our government,” said Blake. “Our constitution recognizes the pioneers of Alaska and everybody that came after. Even in our constitution, we are forgotten. At the founding of our state, we weren’t even allowed to vote.” 

“It makes it really hard to get our people, who have felt generations of disenfranchisement, erasure, and racism, excited about stepping foot into those spaces,” she added. “It is a matter of getting our people comfortable in these spaces that have never ever written laws that feel like they are on our side.” 

Blake regrets that many Alaska politicians don’t talk about how to preserve the subsistence lifestyles prevalent in Alaska Native towns in remote parts of the state, and don’t help residents in those regions keep living off the land so communities can continue their traditional practices and way of life. “All of our people still hunt, fish and gather the same way our ancestors did,” Blake said. “But it’s a slow death by a thousand cuts, where each generation doesn’t realize the rights of hunting, fishing and gathering that are being stripped away from them.”

Peltola, Alaska’s newest member of Congress, hails from the Bethel region, in the Bush, and she has focused on fishing issues since joining the House. She once worked as executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and she has even missed some sessions of Congress to help her family store fish for the winter. 

“The fact that every summer she gets out there to fish for salmon, smoke it and dry it and share it with family—she is very much a subsistence driven person who lives off the land,” said Nelson. “Many of us consider ourselves salmon people, we really rely on the rivers and oceans here to provide for us.”

Turnout is typically much lower in primaries than in November. But under Alaska’s old system in place through 2020, the summer primary was what decided the final winner in many races—for instance in legislative districts that overwhelmingly lean in one direction or another. 

In the new system, major decisions always take place in the higher-turnout general elections, since the primary’s leading candidates make it all the way there regardless of party. Voters in the fall rank as many of the candidates as they choose; once votes are tabulated, the candidate with the least first-choice support is eliminated and the totals are retabulated based on voters’ ranked preferences, until a winner emerges who has more than 50 percent of the vote. 

Partisan primaries were “a playground of the party faithful,” Sparck said, and it was hard to draw voters in. “It’s hard to compete with the summer. It’s hard to compete with subsistence. How many people in the villages are just out in the wilderness trying to survive, trying to stock our freezers for the winter?”

Until 2020, voters who wanted to take part in the primary had to choose either a Democrat or Republican ballot to participate; critics of this older system say this was a turn-off to independents, preventing them from picking candidates they like in different parties’ contests. 

Now voters can pick candidates from different parties. In the 2022 open primary, the first of its kind, almost half of Alaskans chose candidates from different parties, according to a report prepared by the organization Get Out the Native Vote. 

The shift proved particularly helpful for Native voters to express their preferences: In districts with a predominantly Native population, 80 percent of voters split their ballot.

“More than anywhere else in the state, voters in predominantly Alaska Native communities supported a list of candidates and expressed preferences that would have been impossible to support in a partisan primary,” Burke Croft, deputy data director with Ship Creek Group, a political consulting firm that led the data analysis for the report. “Partisan primaries disadvantage people who want to express preferences across party lines.”

One concern voiced by critics of the ranked-choice system is that it leads some people to waste their vote: If they haven’t ranked enough candidates, their preference may not influence the final rounds of the tabulation. This is called an exhausted ballot.

A recent study by Nolan McCarty, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, found that in Alaska’s 2022 election, voters in predominantly Native districts were more likely to end up with exhausted ballots than the rest of the population. The finding was part of broader results that indicated that ranked-choice voting may dilute the voting power of minority voters. The study was released in January by the Center for Election Confidence, an organization that opposes ranked-choice voting.

In an interview with Bolts, McCarty said this may be due to the fact that fewer candidates make direct appeals to voters of color and to Indigeneous communities. 

“I think certain groups are just not mobilized to cast second ballots,” he said. “Voters often only rank multiple candidates if those candidates make appeals to them,” he said. That may change if future candidates “find it beneficial to reach out to those groups to get those second and third place rankings.”

Organizers say they’re working with voters to minimize ballot exhaustion. But some also push back on the notion that an exhausted ballot is a wasted vote. It still allows voters to express their preferences, Croft said, including by withholding a vote in protest against a candidate that doesn’t align with their values.

“We need to understand that [an exhausted ballot] can be a viable, intentional choice rather than disenfranchisement,” Croft said. “Any time a voter steps into a ballot box, they are expressing their preferences one way or another, even if they walk in, don’t fill out any boxes, and turn it in.”

Phil Izon, who runs Alaskans for Honest Elections, the group behind Measure 2, says the ranked-choice system does more harm than good for Alaska Natives and he pointed Bolts to McCarthy’s study, saying, “The research is there but people don’t want to look at the research because it doesn’t fit their narrative.” 

Izon began organizing against ranked-choice voting after the 2022 election and drew quick support from Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor who lost the U.S. House race to Peltola in 2022. Izon, who says he has consulted for Palin in the past, also says on his website that he wants Alaska to hand count ballots, a cause some conservatives have nationwide.

Izon argues that the new voting system doesn’t help independents run for office, as they’re likely to need party support to make the top 4. He also cites a statement against ranked choice by Native Americans for Sovereignty and Preservation, a conservative Arizona-based organization connected to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. 

Historically, debates over ranked-choice voting did not clearly fall along partisan lines, and Democrats have also fought its implementation in some places like Washington, D.C. and Nevada. But the issue has grown increasingly partisan in recent years.

In Alaska, many Republicans turned hard against the new system after Palin’s loss to Peltola in 2022. 

Palin reacted to the result by calling ranked-choice voting “crazy, convoluted, confusing,” and her allies followed suit. Conservatives were also frustrated that the new system meant they could no longer target Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who in early 2021 voted to convict Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, in a GOP primary. Murkowski was endorsed by the Alaska Federation of Natives and easily won reelection in November 2022 in the final round of ranked-choice voting; most voters who selected a Democrat as their first choice also then ranked Murkowski over her Trump-endorsed challenger.

Peltola, meanwhile, has praised ranked-choice voting and endorsed its spread to other states. “Ranked choice voting is gaining popularity because it’s giving people a better voice in their democracy,” Pelota said in 2022. “People can vote for the candidates they align with instead of being forced to vote defensively every election.” Peltola did not return a request for comment for this article. 

Besides Alaska, only Maine uses a ranked-choice voting system in statewide elections. Maine Republicans unsuccessfully tried to organize a ballot measure to repeal ranked-choice voting, and they also failed to challenge the system in court. 

Republicans in other states have also grown more aggressive in opposing ranked-choice voting in recent years. Ten GOP-leaning states have now passed laws prohibiting local governments from adopting ranked-choice voting systems, and this fall voters in Missouri will decide on a similar ban. “Missourians don’t want more voter confusion and exhaustion when they go to the ballot box than they already have,” one of that measure’s chief Republican sponsors has said. 

This fall in Alaska, Peltola is up for reelection again alongside Measure 2. In November she will face three candidates in a general election that will once again be decided by ranked-choice voting—possibly for the last time if voters approve Measure 2 on the same day.

Nelson, the co-chair of the AFN, now hopes to mobilize Native voters to reelect Peltola and halt the repeal effort. He told Bolts that the tribes in his federation will spread the word through local networks like the regional corporations that manage Native land claims.

“It’s just the whole gamut of tactics you can imagine, including social media and video ads,” he said. “It requires a lot of traveling… In our rural areas, we have to rely on locals there, even posting flyers at the local grocery and that type of thing.”

“The get out the vote effort is something we are always doing,” he continued. “But this year, there is an added urgency because of the attacks on ranked-choice voting and also because our congresswoman is up for election.”

The post Native Leaders Organize to Defend Alaska’s Ranked Choice Voting System appeared first on Bolts.

Palin’s reaction mirrors the worry, shared by both parties’ establishments, that ranked choice voting is making election outcomes more unpredictable at a time when high-profile races are more foreseeable than ever based on partisanship.

Now ranked choice voting is up for voter approval in Nevada, one of the nation’s most competitive states.

Question 3, which would amend the Nevada Constitution to implement a system similar to Alaska’s ranked choice voting, faces a bipartisan chorus of high-profile critics in the state, from the GOP chair to the state’s Democratic governor and both Democratic U.S. senators. 

Like in Alaska, the amendment would set up a two-round system. First, it would make all candidates for congressional, gubernatorial, state executive and legislative contests run in a single primary open to all voters. The top five vote getters would then advance to the general election, where a second change would take effect: ranked choice voting, where voters can rank all five candidates on the ballot. 

Despite attempts by critics to disqualify the initiative, the Nevada Supreme Court in June ruled 4-3 to let the proposed changes, known collectively as Final-Five Voting, onto the November ballot. The issue will now go before the one group that appears most excited about the reform: the public. A poll from August showed that Nevada voters support Question 3 by a 15-point margin (though nearly a third of voters say they neither support nor oppose the idea). Because the measure requires an amendment to the state constitution, it must pass this November and then again in 2024. If it passes both elections, Final-Five Voting would take effect in the 2026 election cycle.

Even small changes could tilt the balance of power in Nevada, a Democratic-controlled battleground state that was led by a Republican governor, legislature, and U.S. Senator as recently as 2016. However, neither the political dynamics nor the arguments against ranked choice voting are unique to Nevada. 

Whether it’s Democrats or Republicans, the political establishment often fights RCV, and they tend to offer the same justifications: it’s confusing, potentially discriminatory, and, especially after Alaska’s recent experience with ranked choice voting, unfair. 

These criticisms are especially pressing as RCV grows. In 2010, only eight major cities used ranked choice. As of July 2022, it’s used in two states, one county, and 53 cities, which are home to over 11 million voters, according to FairVote, a nonprofit advocating for RCV nationwide.  

This November, nine other jurisdictions have an RCV initiative on the ballot. Nevada is the only one that includes open primaries as well, but two others—Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine—would implement RCV on top of proportional representation, which is a “silver bullet toward gerrymandering,” says Deb Otis, director of research at FairVote, which advocates for ranked choice voting. 

Proponents of Final-Five Voting in Nevada argue that open primaries and RCV are particularly well suited for the state’s political landscape. About 37 percent of voters are registered with a minor party or as nonpartisan, which is greater than both registered Democrats (33 percent) and Republicans (30 percent). Meanwhile, the state has been so gerrymandered that about half  of state legislative primaries were uncontested this year.

And where there have been competitive races, the winner often earns less than the majority. Steve Sisolak won the governorship in 2018 with 49.4 percent of the vote, and Catherine Cortez Masto won her U.S. Senate seat in 2016 with 47.1 percent.

Ranked choice voting would ensure that the winner has majority support. If no candidate earns more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the bottom vote getter is eliminated, and their second-choice votes are redistributed to the other candidates. That process continues until someone takes the majority. 

“RCV rewards both deep support as evidenced by a high number of first rankings, and broad support, as evidenced by many backup rankings,” writes Steven Hill, co-founder of FairVote.

Critics like Sisolak argue that the ranking process is confusing for voters, especially voters of color, although at least one study suggests little difference in how racial and ethnic groups understand the process. Otis argues that RCV can prevent the kind of vote dilution that can obstruct candidates of color. She points to the recent Democratic congressional primary in Detroit, which is 80 percent Black. There were nine candidates running, and after voters split their votes between multiple Black contenders, a non-Black candidate won with around 28 percent of the vote. Now, Detroit will likely not have Black representation in Congress for the first time since the early 1950s.

“Once they get to know the candidate field, people tend to know, ‘Oh, I like these three,’ ‘I’d be ok with these three,’ and ‘I really don’t want these three,’” she says. “But we’re locked into a ballot style where we cannot express that.” 

In terms of difficulty, voters also reported few problems in the most recent high-profile ranked choice voting election, the Alaska special election triggered by the death of U.S. Representative Don Young. Ninety-five percent of voters surveyed by Alaskans for Better Elections said that they’d received instructions on how to rank their choices before filling out their ballots. Only 6 percent said that the system was “very difficult” to use. Eighty-five percent said it was “somewhat” or “very” simple. 

After nearly 50 candidates ran in the election’s first stage in June, four moved to the August runoff to be decided by ranked choice voting. One dropped out, leaving in Peltola the Democrat and two Republicans: Palin and Nick Begich. 

In the first round of the ranked choice voting, Peltola received about 40 percent of the vote; the two Republicans combined for about 60 percent, with Palin coming in second. When Begich’s voters were transferred to other candidates, though, Peltola clinched a win over Palin, 51 to 49 percent.

To Palin, this was evidence that something went awry: The victory of a Democrat, Palin says, has “disenfranchised” the 60 percent of first-round voters who opted for a Republican. 

But voters select candidates, not parties. Just half of Begich voters chose Palin as their second choice, and nearly 30 percent flipped and went to Peltola.

When unpopular candidates with a ceiling to their support like Palin prevail in a primary, they often lose a lot of voters their party would otherwise expect to win in a general election, which leads to upsets. The Begich voters who voted for Peltola may fall in that familiar category. 

But the remaining 21 percent didn’t rank anyone else, meaning their ballot was “exhausted” in the final round of the election between Palin and Peltola, and played no role. Critics of ranked-choice voting generally fault the system for producing too many of these “exhausted” ballots, leaving some unable to influence the decisive round. 

David O’Brien, policy counsel for RepresentUs, says choosing how many people to rank is part of what people get to decide. “We shouldn’t assume people don’t rank every candidate because they’re confused or don’t understand the process,” he says. “If voters don’t choose to rank every candidate, that’s their choice.”

Still, about eight percent of all voters who participated in Alaska’s August primaries did not have a preference registered in the final round that settled the House winner. That’s an unusually high rate for a high-profile election. In the past two cycles in November 2018, and 2020, no more than 2.5 percent of Alaskans who went to the polls skipped voting in the U.S. House general election. Now, Peltola, Begich, and Palin are all running again in a regularly-scheduled election in November, and Republicans think they can do better with fewer “exhausted” ballots. They are urging voters to “rank the red” to ensure that either Palin or Begich wins.

If Nevada switches to a similar system, it may shuffle the partisan calculations of the state’s usually-tight general elections. 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Katherine Gehl, who founded The Institute for Political Innovation, which has led the campaign for Final-Five Voting in Nevada this year. 

She argues that, because the status quo guarantees the dominance of both major political parties, especially in gerrymandered districts without competitive primaries, politicians have little incentive to deliver results for voters. In that sense, Final Five is as much about changing the behavior or lawmakers as it about voters. “The threat of new competition in any industry, that really drives progress,” she says.  

The post Nevada Voters Consider Bringing Ranked Choice Elections to a Swing State appeared first on Bolts.

If the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Roe vs. Wade, the right to access abortion will stay protected in Kansas—at least for now—because of a recent ruling by its state supreme court. The North Carolina Supreme Court struck down Republican gerrymanders earlier this year, producing fairer midterm maps. And last year, Washington State’s supreme court restricted sentences of life without parole for youth beyond what the U.S. Supreme Court has established. 

Judges grounded all of these decisions in their state constitutions. As conservatives flex their stronghold on the federal bench to unravel decades of constitutional protections, state courts can offer alternative paths for civil rights litigation. Inversely, some state courts are proving as zealously conservative as the U.S. Supreme Court, as when Louisiana’s high court effectively restricted the right to protest earlier this year.

The midterm elections are now poised to reshuffle many supreme courts. Voters will elect dozens of justices all around the country, expanding or restricting these courts’ viability as a counter-weight to federal judges.

These elections will decide many of the judges who will hear election law cases in 2024, when former President Donald Trump could once again push to overturn election results. They may also hear many more cases dealing with reproductive rights if the end of Roe makes each state responsible for determining the legality of abortion.

The stakes are most transparent in the four states where the partisan balance of their supreme courts is on the line this fall—Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, and Ohio.

But the 2022 cycle could also shift jurisprudence across the country if the fragile balance of power is altered in some state supreme courts. In Arkansas, Montana, and New Mexico, for instance, conservative lawyers are running to push the bench further to the right. In Washington State, justices who have formed a narrow progressive bloc are up for re-election.

Most states with supreme court elections this year organize them as regular elections, namely races where multiple candidates face off against each other. Other states straddle a middle ground between appointed and elected judiciaries, with appointed judges facing so-called retention elections, which are up-and-down votes without challengers. It is exceedingly rare for justices to be ousted in retention elections—in fact, in some states this has never happened—though this is at least an avenue for major upheavals this fall in populous states such as Arizona, California, and Florida, if organizing on the left or right were to pick-up. 

This breakdown from Bolts walks you through each state’s supreme court elections, telling you who’s running at this stage and why the race could matter. 

As the year progresses, new resignations and vacancies could spark new judicial elections, or even cancel them. Ballotpedia’s database can keep you up-to-date.

States with regular supreme court elections

Alabama

A longtime election lawyer for Republicans, Greg Cook is now sowing doubt about the handling of the 2020 election and blaming other state supreme courts for allowing expanded voting options that year. These Trumpian concerns are a major reason he is running to replace a retiring Alabama justice this year, he says. In the May Republican primary, Cook defeated lower-court judge Debra Jones, who also tied herself to the former president, in the Republican primary. He will be favored against Democrat Anita Kelly in the November general election given the state’s politics.

In the state’s second supreme court election, Republican Justice Kelli Wise drew no challenger.

Arkansas

Arkansas’s supreme court elections are ostensibly nonpartisan—but in the May 24 elections, candidates with close ties to the GOP hope to push the court to the right. 

Justice Karen Baker faces Gunner DeLay, a lower-court judge and former Republican lawmaker. DeLay, besides touting his conservative politics, is using the old-school tactic of attacking Baker over a vote she took to vacate a murder conviction. (The court found in that case that a charge had been filed in the wrong jurisdiction.) And one of the two challengers to Justice Robin Wynne is the former executive director of the state Republican Party, Chris Carnahan. (A third justice, Rhonda Wood, is unopposed.)

Update (Sept. 26): Baker defeated DeLay on May 24, but Carnahan forced Wynne in a November runoff, Bolts reported.

Georgia 

On paper, the 2022 cycle had the potential to rock Georgia’s supreme court: Four seats, a majority of seats on the court, were meant to be on the ballot at once. But by the time the filing deadline passed, one of those four elections was canceled, and two incumbents recently appointed by Governor Brian Kemp had drawn no opponent. 

The reason: A “dystopian” loophole that allows Georgia officials to game the system by delaying elections at the last minute, pulling the rug out from under challengers late into a campaign—as state Republicans did in 2018. The gambit appears to be having a chilling effect on candidates’ willingness to jump in.  

As the state’s supreme court moves further to the right, at least on criminal justice issues, this legal loophole helps Republicans lock down a conservative bench as long as they have the governorship. The one justice who faces an opponent in the May election is Verda Colvin, against Veronica Brinson.

Idaho

Justices Robyn Brody and Colleen Zahn will each be unopposed as they seek a new term. 

Even though it is mostly made up of Republican appointees, this supreme court has protected progressives’ efforts to use direct democracy to circumvent the GOP-run state government. In 2019, it ruled against a conservative lawsuit seeking to invalidate a ballot initiative that expanded Medicaid; last summer, it struck down a Republican law that would have made it significantly harder to qualify an initiative on the ballot. Zahn just joined the court in the summer of 2021 and took part in neither of those decisions; Brody was part of the majority in the latter ruling.

Illinois

Partisan control of the Illinois supreme court could flip, and Republicans had to score an unlikely win just to get this far. A Democratic justice lost an up-or-down retention vote in 2020 and had to leave the court, which triggered an extra election to replace him this year. Two seats are on the ballot, and Republicans would seize control of the court—and with it the power to revisit the state’s Democratic gerrymanders, among other state issues like pension reform—if they win both.

Illinois justices are elected by district rather than statewide, which helps Republicans as neither of the two elections that will decide the court’s partisan balance involves any voter from heavily Democratic Cook County. (The state constitution gives Cook County three supreme court seats, and the rest of the state gets four.) Democrats redrew the judicial map last year for the first time since the 1960s; the 2nd district (Lake, Kane, McHenry, Kendall and DeKalb counties) and 3rd district (Bureau, DuPage, Grundy, Kankakee, Iroquois, LaSalle, Will counties) will decide the court’s balance. 

Separately, one Illinois justice from each party is facing a retention election. 

Kentucky

Joseph Fischer, a Republican lawmaker who has led the fight to pass abortion restrictions in the Kentucky legislature, is now running for a seat on the state supreme court. He is challenging Michelle Keller, a Democratic-appointed justice, in the sixth district, in northern Kentucky. That election is one of several that will decide this supreme court’s membership this year, since two justices are not seeking re-election in the second and fourth districts. Kentucky’s high court has been an active player in the battles between the Democratic governor and Republican legislature, for instance in its unanimous ruling last year reinstating a law that limited the governor’s public health emergency powers.

But the biggest fireworks in Kentucky’s judicial elections may be found in the very local election for the circuit court of Franklin County, a small jurisdiction that has outsized importance for civil rights and voting rights and has drawn the attention of U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, as Bolts reported in February. 

Louisiana

The Louisiana Supreme Court issued a 6-1 ruling earlier this year that makes protesters guilty by association, threatening the right to protest. And conservatives’ stronghold on the court is sure to continue after 2022. The one justice due to face voters this year is John Weimer, who joined the majority in that ruling, and who represents the 6th judicial district, a large coastal area in the southeast of Louisiana. Weimer faced no opponent in his prior two elections in 2002 and 2012; the filing deadline for 2022 has not yet passed. 

Update (Sept. 26): No one filed to challenge Weimer by the filing deadline for the third consecutive cycle. Weimer has thereby secured another term.

Michigan

The 2022 elections will decide nothing less than who controls the state supreme court in one of the nation’s premier swing states during the 2024 presidential race. And since allies of Donald Trump who trot out his Big Lie are trying to take over the machinery of election administration in Michigan, this supreme court may come to play an exceptionally important role at that time. The court’s majority will also be critical on criminal justice issues given a new slate of party-line decisions this year.

Democrats currently enjoy a 4-3 majority on the court. One justice from each party faces voters this year (Richard Bernstein and Brian Zahra, respectively). Republicans need to win both seats to regain control of the court.

Minnesota

Natalie Hudson and Gordon Moore, who are both justices appointed by Democratic governors, are up for re-election this year. Minnesota’s supreme court elections appear as nonpartisan on the ballot, and incumbents have easily won all elections held over the last decade. 

Update (Sept. 26): No one filed to run against either Hudson or Moore.

Montana

Conservatives want more control over Montana’s judiciary, and they have tried (unsuccessfully so far) to change election rules. This year, they are taking aim at both supreme court justices on the ballot, Democratic-appointed Ingrid Gayle Gustafson and GOP-appointed James Rice. 

Gustafson in particular faces an opponent who enjoys strong support from the state’s Republican officials: Jim Brown, a former counsel for the state’s Republican Party, as well as for a group that took down the state’s election disclosure laws. (A lower-court judge, Mike McMahon, is running in this election as well.) Montana’s supreme court is now at the center of the state’s latest voting rights disputes, as it’s long been, adding special importance to this showdown.

Nevada

Incumbent judges frequently go unopposed, and that will be the case this year for Justice Ron Parraguirre. But what’s more surprising is that the retirement of Justice James Hardesty has also occasioned no contest: Linda Bell, a lower court judge who has worked as a federal public defender and as a local prosecutor, is the only candidate and will join the state’s highest court. 

New Mexico

New Mexico’s state supreme court, which is currently entirely made up of Democratic justices, is sure to keep its Democratic majority this fall. But Republicans could narrow their deficit; Justices Julie Vargas and Briana Zamora, both appointees of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, will face GOP challengers Thomas Montoya and Kerry Morris, respectively. 

In a letter touting his candidacy, Morris casts Montoya and himself as “conservative voices,” and frames his bid as an answer “to the power of George Soros and Zucker Bucks [in reference to Mark Zuckerberg] to control the elections in New Mexico.” As Bolts reported in March, some on the right are fomenting conspiracies tying election funding to Soros and Zuckerberg, both of whom are Jewish, often spuriously.

North Carolina

The math is simple but the stakes are high in North Carolina. Democratic justices hold four of seven Supreme Court seats but they must defend two this year. If a Republican flips just one of them, they would gain control of the court. 

Given the state’s recent history, a partisan flip would affect the outcome of major civil rights cases. In recent years, the Democratic-majority court has voted on party lines to struck down GOP gerrymanders expanded the scope of racial discrimination appeals in the criminal legal system. It is now considering the constitutionality of the state’s felony disenfranchisement statutes in a case that may restore voting rights to tens of thousands of North Carolinians.

Depending on the outcome, Democrats may rue the 2020 cycle, when Democratic Chief Justice Cheri Beasley lost her re-election race by just 401 votes.

North Dakota

Justice Daniel Crothers is running for a new 10-year term unopposed, just like the last two times he faced voters, now that the filing deadline has passed for anyone to challenge him.

Ohio

Ohio’s highest court struck down Republican gerrymanders on 4-3 votes this year, with the three Democratic justices who prevailed in 2018 and 2020 in the majority, joined by Republican Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor. 

But everything is now on the line in 2022. Three seats are on the ballot, and all are now held by Republican justices, so Democrats have a shot at grabbing a majority of the court. But the court could also shift to the right because O’Connor is barred from seeking re-election due to her age. This means that, if Republicans sweep the cycle’s three elections, and even if these would all be partisan holds, it would likely tip the balance toward them in future redistricting cases, and re-open the gerrymandering floodgates.

One twist: The only Democrat running for O’Connor’s chief justice seat is Jennifer Brunner, who is already a justice on the court. Were she to win and flip that seat for Democrats, Ohio’s Republican governor would likely get to appoint Brunner’s successor. In other words, Democrats must flip one of the other two seats—ousting either Pat Fischer or Pat DeWine, the son of the state’s governor—to be sure to seize a court majority. 

Oregon

Governor Kate Brown appointed Roger DeHoog, a lower-court judge with past experience as a public defender, to the state Supreme Court in January. The appointment was noteworthy given the dearth of justices who have worked as public defenders in state supreme courts.

DeHoog is now seeking a full 6-year term—and he is sure to win, since no one filed to challenge him.

Texas

Conservative “stop the steal” activists fell short in their effort to oust a Republican judge in the March primary; they were angry at Scott Walker’s vote late last year to limit the attorney general’s efforts to investigate voter fraud. Now, it’s time for the general election. All 18 judges across the state’s two high courts are Republican, and five of them (including Walker) will face Democratic challengers in November. 

Democrats will have their work cut out for them: They haven’t won a statewide election in the state since 1994, and all the seats on the 2022 ballot (three on the Court of Criminal Appeals, which handles criminal cases, and three on the Supreme Court) feature a GOP incumbent. Of note: Two of the Democratic challengers, Erin Nowell and Amanda Reichek, are lower-court judges who beat Republican incumbents in 2018.

Washington

Washington’s supreme court has grown more progressive and diverse with Governor Jay Inslee’s appointments, with major ramifications for criminal justice. Last year, the court issued landmark rulings that expanded restrictions on life sentences, and that struck down state statutes that criminalized drug possession. (State Democrats then passed a law that makes drug possession a misdemeanor; it was a felony before the court’s ruling.) Both rulings were 5-4, a sign of the importance of court membership even in reliably Democratic-states.

Two of the justices in this emerging progressive majority, Mary Yu and Helen Whitener, have to face voters to secure new terms this year, as does a third incumbent, Barbara Madsen.

Incumbent justices seeking re-election in Washington have won very easily in recent cycles; the elections appear on the ballot as non-partisan.

Update (Sept. 26): None of the three justices who are seeking a new term this year will face an opponent on the ballot.

States that only have retention elections this year

Alaska

Daniel Winfree, the only sitting justice appointed by former Governor Sarah Palin, is technically up for retention this year, but he is set to hit the mandatory retirement age early next year anyway. Whomever is elected governor this fall will appoint Winfree’s replacement, and at least one other justice, and candidates are connecting the dots to future of abortion rights.

Arizona

Bill Montgomery built a punitive record as prosecutor of Arizona’s Maricopa County until he was nominated to the state supreme court in 2019 by the Republican governor. This year, he faces his first retention election, alongside other Republican-nominated justices. The political context is explosive: The GOP expanded the court’s size and changed the appointment procedure last decade to solidify conservative power.

On paper, all of this could all add up to a major showdown—if it weren’t so exceedingly rare for Arizona judges to fail retention elections. When voters ousted a county judge in 2014, it was the first time an Arizona judge had lost a retention election in decades. And it has not happened since.

California 

It would mark a significant break with recent history if California’s retention elections proved contentious this year. No justice has so much as dipped below two-thirds of the vote in the last two midterm cycles. Still, four justices are up for retention this year—one appointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, another by Jerry Brown, and two by Gavin Newsom.

Progressives looking to affect the court have focused their efforts on pressuring Governor Gavin Newsom to appoint a justice with background as a public defender, which has not happened in decades in this state. But both of Newsom’s appointments have prosecutorial experience instead. 

Florida

Five of the seven justices on Florida’s supreme court are up for retention this year, including two appointed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. On paper, then, Democrats have a path to reverse the court’s dramatic rightward shift; also on paper, the right could push its advantage since one of the justices on the ballot, Jorge Labarga, is part of the court’s shrinking left flank.

But in practice, it would be an immense undertaking to convince the electorate to fire a justice. No judge has ever lost a retention election in Florida. 

And regardless of the ballot box, conservatives are likely to further solidify their hold on this court since Alan Lawson (one of the court’s less conservative justices) recently announced he would retire over the summer, granting DeSantis yet another appointment.

Indiana

Justice Steven David was meant to face a retention election in 2022, but he indicated instead that he would retire at the end of the year, so Indiana will host no supreme court race this year. Republican Governor Eric Holcomb will choose David’s replacement in the coming months.

Iowa

Not long ago, Iowa’s supreme court leaned liberal, as it issued a landmark ruling on same-sex marriage in 2009 and considered other progressive lawsuits. But the court has swung to the right alongside the rest of the state because conservatives ousted three justices in the 2010 cycle, and later Republican governors got to appoint many judges. The 2022 ballot features retention elections for two of GOP Governor Kim Reynolds’s appointees, Dana Oxley and Matthew McDermott, who long worked as a lawyer for Republican politicians.

Kansas

The Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the state constitution protects access to abortion. That landmark decision, which drew just one dissenter, was the latest in a string of decisions on reproductive rights. Those battles bled into the electoral realm in 2016, when conservative groups led by Kansas for Life targeted a group of justices. But all incumbents prevailed that year by margins no smaller than 10 percentage points.  

This year, six of seven Kansas justices (three of whom joined the court after that 2019 ruling) are on the ballot in retention elections.

Conservatives are seeking another route this year to overturn the court’s rulings on reproductive rights: Kansans will vote on a constitutional amendment on August 2 that would affirm there is no right to an abortion in the state constitution, effectively overturning the court’s 2019 ruling. (If the referendum fails, though, the court’s composition will remain paramount for this issue.)

Redistricting is also on the menu: By the time these retention elections come around, the Kansas supreme court will have settled the uncertain fate of the state’s GOP gerrymander.

Maryland 

Five of the court’s seven judges have been appointed by Republican Governor Larry Hogan and confirmed by the Democratic-controlled state Senate. Hogan’s first four appointees easily cleared their retention elections in past cycles, receiving at least 75 percent of the vote. The fifth, Steven Gould, faces voters this year.

Missouri 

Two judges face voters in retention elections this year: longtime incumbent Zel Fischer, and the recently appointed Robin Ransom. Retention elections have been uneventful in Missouri’s recent history; no judge has received less than 63 percent of the vote over the past ten years, and often they win with even higher margins.

Nebraska 

Nebraskans have overwhelmingly voted to retain their supreme court justices ever since a successful campaign in 1996 to oust David Lanphier over some of his rulings, including one that gave dozens of people incarcerated over murder convictions the opportunity for new trials. There is no indication so far that this year will be any different, with four justices up for retention if they choose to seek new terms.

Oklahoma

Oklahoma’s supreme court judges have never lost a retention election, according to The Oklahoman, despite the court’s history of high-profile decisions. There’s no reason so far to suspect that 2022 will wield a different result. Up for retention this year: Two longstanding justices who have already won two retention elections, alongside two newly appointed judges.

South Dakota

In November, South Dakota’s Supreme Court struck down a voter-approved initiative that legalized marijuana. The decision could become a campaign issue, considering two of the four justices who issued that ruling are facing voters in a retention election this year.

Tennessee 

Tennessee’s Supreme Court has already shifted rightward in 2022: In January, Governor Bill Lee appointed Sarah Campbell, a conservative jurist and former clerk for Samuel Alito, to replace one of the court’s only two Democratic-appointed justices, who passed away in the fall. 

As recently as 2014, a majority of justices were appointees of a Democratic governor. That year, conservatives launched a major offensive to oust them, but all incumbents prevailed that year by double-digits. Republicans have controlled the governor’s mansion since 2011, though, and they have been able to change the court’s composition through appointments.

The only remaining Democratic-appointed justice, Sharon Lee, is up for retention this year, as is Campbell and other justices. 

Utah

Utah justices facing retention elections over the past decade have all won with at least 75 percent of the vote, which bodes well for Justice Paige Petersen in her retention election this year. The bigger upheaval this year is that GOP Governor Spencer Cox gets to fill two vacancies, including one triggered by the retirement of Thomas Lee, brother of U.S. Senator Mike Lee.

The post Your State-by-State Guide to the 2022 Supreme Court Elections appeared first on Bolts.