The Rising Star of Election Manipulation

2024 Ballot Initiative Would Change Election Results

Last Wednesday, news broke that a number of activist groups are banding together to put an initiative on the ballot that would change the way Idaho votes.  There are two main points to the initiative:

1. Require all primaries to be open.

2. Implement Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in our general elections.

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Open Primaries

The Republican primary in Idaho is ‘closed’, meaning only registered Republicans can vote in it. Because Idaho is overwhelmingly Republican and all statewide officeholders and most legislators are Republican, the case is put forth that all voters should be able to vote in the Republican primary since that generally determines the ultimate winner. This initiative therefore seeks to make all primaries ‘open’.

But shouldn’t a political party have the right to decide how it selects its candidates? Should Republicans be allowed to pick the Democratic nominee for President or vice-versa?

A ‘primary’ is the nomination process for a political party. If you are not a member of that party, why should you have a say in who that party selects as a candidate? It should remain the decision of the party as to how they nominate their candidates. Forcing a party to open its primaries is authoritarian. If they want more competitive elections, perhaps the proponents of this initiative should focus instead on how to make the Democrat platform more appealing in Idaho.

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Ranked Choice Voting

The subject of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) has been covered quite thoroughly.  For a primer, watch the 1-minute video below.

While it may sound reasonable on the surface, it is really just the rising star in election manipulation. To see why, consider a theoretical 3-way race with a conservative, a centrist and a liberal candidate. If the conservative or the liberal get the fewest votes, they are eliminated and their votes will likely go to the centrist. Only when the centrist gets the fewest votes will the conservative or liberal be able to win. Theoretically, this means:

• Centrist candidates have a 67% chance of winning run-offs.

• Conservative and liberal candidates each have about a 16.5% chance of winning run-offs.

• With more candidates, the odds for conservative and liberal candidates will be even worse.

Fair?

Proponents of RCV will point out that this means the least objectionable candidate wins, but do lukewarm candidates make for better leaders? RCV robs the election process of bold visionaries in favor of conformist, status quo candidates. If it were a market, RCV would stifle innovation. If it were the Olympics, RCV would tout the athlete who won 2 bronze medals over the athlete with one gold.

We can dig deeper into the pros and cons. We can point out that the primary benefit of RCV, to ensure that the winner gets over 50% of the vote, has not panned out in actual elections. Over 60% of the time, due to ‘ballot exhaustion’, RCV winners actually had less than 50% of the vote. ¹

We can also point to voter confusion around RCV, that knowledge of more than one or two candidates is taxing on a voter, or how RCV complicates vote tabulation (ie. post-election audits). But there is one other major factor to consider: do we really want to add a controversial change to our election process when half the electorate is already questioning the integrity of our elections?² We need to address that crisis before we even consider throwing more wrenches into the process.

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Conclusion

We would probably not be discussing this initiative without the influence of big tech and big media on our elections, but I will leave that for another day. For now, the two main items within the initiative are both bad ideas because:

• Each political party should decide for itself how to nominate their candidates and not be told by outside groups how to do so.

• The concern over our elections already has a lot of people upset and adding ranked choice voting on top of that, among other reasons, will make matters far worse.

The 2024 ballot initiative to open primaries and implement ranked choice voting needs to be soundly defeated.

1. https://mainepolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/RCV-Final-Booklet-.pdf

2. https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/public_surveys/election_integrity_50_think_cheating_likely_in_midterms?utm_campaign=RR07102022&utm_source=RR07102022&utm_medium=email