OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a current candidate for the state’s lone representative in the House, has a dire warning for voters.
In a recent interview she warned that ranked choice voting is designed to help Democrats win elections, Breitbart News reported.
“’Ranked choice voting’ — approved by referendum in Alaska in 2020 and first applied in 2022 — removes the standard voting protocol of an individual voter selecting one candidate on a ballot. Instead, voters using ranked choice voting assign a numerical rank to multiple candidates rather than voting for one preferred candidate,” the report said.
The candidate spoke to Breitbart News editor Adrienne Ross in an interview this week where she gave the warning.
“This is what’s going to elect Democrats and destroy our country before we even know it,” she said as more people want to have ranked choice voting. “I am just sounding that alarm that it’s this bad.”
“I don’t want this to happen to any other electorate, in any city, in any state,” the former governor said. “Alaska is kind of this test case right now where we have elements of a perfect bad storm. We have lax voter-ID laws. We have a long election cycle where mail-in ballots can be mailed in for — gosh — it seems like months, if not many weeks.”
“Those are just a couple of aspects that create kind of this distrust of people in the process, and we cannot afford to have people not trust free and fair elections in our communities, in our states, in our nation, or we’re going to go under,” she said.
“It’s not winner-take-all,” the former governor said. “You rank the candidates. … Then a process of elimination via an algorithm in a computer takes votes and distributes it to other candidates if the person that you did choose as your number-one pick didn’t end up on top.”
“The ballot question that asked whether we wanted ranked choice voting, it was 26 pages long, the explanation,” she said. “That right there should have told people, ‘Hey, wait.’ Anything that you can’t explain concisely, it’s no good when it comes to government.”
She said that she believed that the ranked choice voting was designed to keep Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski in power.
“This was written for Lisa Murkowski — and she’s a RINO — to keep her in the U.S. Senate because she can’t run and win as a normal Republican in Alaska because people figured her out. It was her attorney who wrote this thing,” she said.
But it may not assist Sen. Murkowski as a simulation done by FiveThirtyEight showed that the Trump backed candidate, Kelly Tshibaka, defeated Sen. Murkowski 52 of 100 times.
But because Alaska uses ranked choice voting it could favor Murkowski in what is expected to be a close election, Breitbart News reported.
One of the challenges Tshibaka faces is the state’s newly instituted ranked-choice voting system, which ultimately affords Democrat voters the opportunity to vote for Murkowski on the second and third ballots. A recent video exposed a Murkowski aide who said the 2020 ballot initiative to decide whether to institute ranked-choice voting in Alaska was pushed by people who “wanted Lisa to get re-elected.”
Not all circumstances favor Murkowski. Tshibaka has a strong chance to upset Murkowski, whose father gave her the seat 21 years ago.
Tshibaka has gained three endorsements from candidates who have dropped out of the race, an important factor amid the ranked-choice voting system. Coalesced support behind Tshibaka means fewer votes may slip away to Murkowski in the balloting process.
Tshibaka has also thrived on in-state fundraising. While Murkowski has raised 85 percent of 2022 cycle donations from outside the state of Alaska, Tshibaka is winning the battle among Alaskan donors by about $20,000, a notable feat against a politician who has been in office for 21 years.
Murkowski has voted to advance several of Biden’s secretaries including Interior Secretary Deb Haaland who has done damage to Alaska energy producers.
“We knew before the vote that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland would be against our jobs, that she was out to get our jobs, and she hasn’t disappointed on that front,” Oil & Gas Workers Association Matt Coday said.
“And for Lisa Murkowski, for her to cast the tie-breaking vote to advance her confirmation, it’s really a slap in the face of every American who works in this industry,” he said.
