Ranked Choice Voting and the Jungle Primary

It's nothing short of a plan to turn Idaho blue forever

What is ranked choice voting? What are the real goals of the petition filed by Reclaim Idaho and their allies? Did the Attorney General’s office lose in court last week? Read on to find out:

More than ten years ago, the Idaho Republican Party decided to close its primary election. This meant that anyone participating in the Idaho GOP primary must be a registered Republican.

This seems obvious, right? Only Republicans can choose the Republican nominee, just as only Democrats should choose the Democratic nominee. Or to put it another way, the Green Bay Packers don’t get to choose the New England Patriots starting quarterback.

Yet this decision was met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth at the time. Since Idaho has a Republican super-majority, many leftists and moderates believe they should have the right to select the Republican nominee. The Idaho GOP had to sue then-Secretary of State Ben Ysursa to gain control over its own internal elections, and a federal court ruled that forcing parties to participate in open primaries was unconstitutional.

Leftist activists, still looking for ways to co-opt the Republican Party, altered their tactics. Former Republicans such as Jim Jones actively urged progressive Democrats to register as Republican so as to vote for the more leftist candidate in the 2022 GOP primary. Turnout numbers suggest that thousands of Democrats did just that. In response, the Idaho GOP passed some additional rules that intend to prevent Democrats from switching parties right before the primary.

If you’re a leftist in Idaho, you surely recognize that the real election is in the May Republican primary, not the November general election. Therefore doing whatever you can to influence that primary is an entirely rational action. The Idaho GOP is nevertheless responsible for protecting the integrity of its nomination process.

This is perhaps why a coalition of left-wing groups has come up with a plan to completely restructure Idaho’s election system to the detriment of conservatives. This plan involves two major changes to the way elections are conducted in our state:

• The partisan primary, where Republican voters vote for the Republican nominee, would be abolished. In its place would be a “top four” primary, where all candidates are on the ballot, and voters choose any one of them. The top four vote-getters would advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation (or lack thereof).

• Rather than our current first-past-the-post system, the general election would be conducted via an instant runoff, also known as ranked choice voting. In this system, voters rank their candidates by order of preference, and votes are counted in multiple rounds. If nobody receives an outright majority, then the lowest vote-getter is eliminated. Ballots that had that unfortunate candidate ranked first would be counted for whomever the voter ranked second. This process continues until one candidate has a majority, who is then declared the winner.

In theory, ranked choice voting is meant to result in a winner who represents a broader group of voters, especially when there are more than two candidates in a race. This video by CGP Grey explains how the system should ideally work:

Some states have provisions for runoff elections in cases where no candidate receives an outright majority of votes. In those instances, the top two candidates move on to a second round, wherein the winner then takes office. Many municipalities use runoffs — Boise held one in 2019 when Lauren McLean received 45.7% of the vote in the first round. She advanced to a runoff a month later where she defeated incumbent David Bieter with 65.5%.

The issue that people have with runoff elections is that they take more time, cost more money, and often don’t attract the same level of turnout as the regular election. Boise’s 2019 runoff saw about 46,000 voters compared to nearly 52,000 who voted on Election Day. Ranked choice voting creates an instant runoff where a voter’s second or third choice might end up winning.

Consider what might have happened in the 2018 governor’s race with a runoff or instant runoff. Brad Little was a plurality in the Republican primary with 37.3%. Raúl Labrador received 32.6%, and Tommy Ahlquist 26.2%.

Would a runoff or instant runoff have resulted in Labrador winning? Or would Ahlquist’s voters have chosen Little as their second choice? As tempting as it is to assume that the conservative Labrador would have easily won such a contest, we can never know for sure.

In any case, Reclaim’s proposed initiative would not use ranked choice voting within a closed Republican primary. Rather it would create a blanket primary that advances the top four vote-getters, regardless of party, and then use ranked choice voting in the general.

Some conservatives believe that ranked choice voting gives Constitution Party or Libertarian candidates, who might otherwise be neglected, a real chance at winning elections. After all, the biggest reason not to vote for third parties is the risk of splitting the vote with the Republican candidate and allowing the Democrat to win. In fact, that is what happened in the district 15 state senate race last year — Constitution Party candidate Sarah Clendenon’s 413 votes were more than Democrat Rick Just’s margin of victory over Republican Codi Galloway.

I decided to put together a little thought experiment. What might have happened last year in district 15 if the top four primary and ranked choice voting would have been in place last year?

Obviously I had to make a lot of assumptions, but I think this is a reasonable extrapolation. However, we don’t need to make assumptions, because we have a real world example of this very phenomenon.

The State of Alaska recently adopted ranked choice voting after a citizen’s initiative that was endorsed by Senator Lisa Murkowski. Project Veritas caught Murkowski’s staffers bragging that the whole point of the scheme was to keep their boss in power.

As a politician, Murkowski has exhibited uncanny survival skills. She was originally appointed to the US Senate by her father, Frank Murkowski, to fill his own seat when he was elected governor in 2002. Never able to shake the stench of nepotism, the younger Murkowski struggled in every subsequent election, yet always found some way to win.

In 2004, running for election to a full term, Murkowski won with 46.6% of the vote. In 2010, she was defeated in the Republican primary by Joe Miller, but ran a write-in campaign for the general election with significant monetary support from PACs and Native groups. She won with 39.7% of the vote. In 2016, Murkowski once again won without a majority, this time garnering 44.4%.

Ranked choice voting appears to have provided Murkowski with another lifeline. In the second round of the instant runoff, Murkowski led conservative Republican Kelly Tshibaka by only 449 votes, but benefited from being the second choice of voters who supported Democrat Patricia Chesbro, winning more than 90% of the remaining Democrat votes.

Do you see what happened there? Democrat voters joined forces with moderate Republicans to keep a moderate Republican in office. Is that the true purpose of bringing ranked choice voting to Idaho?

As a poll worker, I have seen firsthand how confusing voting can be. Which polling place do you go to? Which ballot do you need? In some races you vote for two candidates, in others you can only vote for one. Don’t forget to flip to the back side!

This all makes sense to people like you and me, who are plugged into politics anyway. But what about those who aren’t — the retail worker who stops at the polling place after a long day on his feet, the busy mother who needs to hurry up and get back to her children, or the senior citizen who wants to be heard but has trouble making sense of it all? Ranked choice voting puts confusion on steroids, making it that much harder for average citizens to fully take part in the process.

Trent England, an activist working against ranked choice voting nationwide, said:

A benefit of normal, plurality elections is simplicity. This is a practical way in which those elections are democratic. Voters can understand what will happen with their votes. Election officials are not in a position where their arbitrary decisions might change election outcomes. No democratic process is perfect, but RCV creates new, serious, and unnecessary problems.

The Idaho Legislature, recognizing the system’s flaws and the threat it poses to our republican form of government, banned ranked choice voting earlier this year. This followed a concerted effort by the Idaho Republican Party which passed resolutions against ranked choice voting at the 2022 State Convention.

Reclaim Idaho collaborated with several other leftist groups to craft a petition that not only replaces our general election system with ranked choice voting, but replaces our closed partisan primary with a top four jungle primary, in which all voters select from all candidates. My former home state of Washington did something similar about a decade ago, switching to a top two primary system. This created a situation where I often had to choose between two Democrats on the general election ballot.

According to Idaho law, the Attorney General issues an opinion on the constitutionality of a proposed initiative, and then if the backers intend to continue, the AG’s office writes the short and general titles for the ballot.

The Attorney General’s analysis noted several substantive issues with the proposed initiative:

• It violates the single-subject rule, presenting two major changes to Idaho law — the blanket primary and ranked choice voting in the general election — in the same initiative.

• Reclaim Idaho attempted to submit their own title for the initiative, which according to Idaho law is the purview of the AG’s office.

• Ranked choice voting violates the state constitution which lays out how elections are to be tabulated.

• The US Constitution says that state legislatures — not citizens initiatives — must determine the method of electing congressmen.

• The initiative violates the right of political parties as private organizations to select their own nominees.

Reclaim Idaho and its allies decided to move ahead with the initiative anyway, though they made some minor changes before submission. One of those was the removal of the phrase “open primary” from the text — keep that in mind.

The Attorney General crafted a short title for the initiative that read:

Measure to (1) replace voter selection of party nominees with nonparty blanket primary; (2) require ranked choice voting for general elections.

Reclaim Idaho was outraged. Despite having removed references to “open primaries” in the text of the initiative, they were apparently still hoping to use the phrase in the title. I presume they figured it would be easier to convince voters to support that than something novel such as a blanket primary. Claiming that the title was inaccurate and biased, they sued the Attorney General and the Secretary of State. Oral arguments were heard on Monday, and the Idaho Supreme Court issued a decision on Thursday.

Watch the complete oral arguments here:

One of the central arguments of the plaintiffs was that the AG’s office did not use the phrase open primaries, which the organizations had been using to promote the initiative. The statutory requirement for the short title is:

…not exceeding twenty words by which the measure is commonly referred to or spoken of…

Idaho Statute 34-1809(2)(d)(i)

Reclaim Idaho and its friends have been promoting this initiative as one that will create an open primary. In fact, the umbrella organization they created to write the initiative and gather signatures is called Idahoans for Open Primaries. They contended, therefore, that the ballot title should refer to the proposed system as an open primary. However, what they are proposing is clearly not an open primary.

Justice Colleen Zahn questioned the plaintiff’s attorney on that subject: “What happens if the commonly known term is incorrect or inaccurate?”

As I said in my introduction, Idaho once had an open primary where voters could choose which party’s ballot to cast. This initiative creates something entirely new, a blanket primary, a jungle primary, a wide-wide-wide open primary.

In her introduction, plaintiff’s attorney Deborah Ferguson gave the game completely away. Referring to Alaska’s adoption of ranked choice voting, she said, “the citizens of Alaska enacted this system, and it’s resulted in the election of more moderate candidates as candidates are encouraged by the system to appeal and respond to a wide swath of voters.”

That is what is going on here, isn’t it? That is why activists such as Reclaim Idaho founder Luke Mayville and the Idaho Democratic Party have joined forces with alleged Republicans like Jim Jones to push this initiative. They are tired of seeing Idahoans elect conservatives, and since they can’t compete according to the rules of the current system, they want to change the rules. First-past-the-post might not be a perfect system, but it has been used in the United States for centuries, allowing our ancestors to create the greatest country in the history of the world. Voters should beware of organizations and activists seeking to change long-established rules for capricious reasons.

Leftist activists in Idaho know they have little chance of electing progressive Democrats statewide, but with a top four primary and ranked choice voting they can keep moderate Republicans like Fred Martin in power for a very long time.

The Idaho Supreme Court released its decision Thursday evening. Despite Reclaim Idaho and the Democrats claiming victory, it was a Pyrrhic one, if that. Click the link below to download the whole thing.

Idahoans For Open Primaries V

106KB ∙ PDF file

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The Court ruled that the AG’s office must rewrite both the short and general titles; however, they rejected the argument that those titles should contain the phrase open primary. This is huge, because that phrase was at the heart of Reclaim’s plan to convince Idaho voters to support this radical initiative.

The petitioners also disagreed with the phrase ranked choice voting, hoping instead to call the system instant runoff. The Court agreed with the AG’s office that the two terms are interchangeable.

The Court also refused to order the Secretary of State to extend the deadline for gathering signatures, which is May 1, 2024. During arguments, Justice Gregory Moeller asked the plaintiff’s attorney, “Where would we get our authority to do that?” The Court held that they had no such authority, and therefore the signature deadline remains unchanged.

The Court ordered the AG’s office to craft a new title by 4pm Friday. Accordingly, the new title reads:

Measure to (1) replace voter selection of party nominees with a top-four primary; (2) require a ranked-choice voting system for general elections.

Contrary to reports from corporate media and the left, this was actually a win for the AG’s office. The Idaho Republican Party agreed — in a statement Friday, Chairwoman Dorothy Moon said, “The Idaho Supreme Court refused to let Reclaim Idaho advance several misleading and inaccurate claims contained in their latest initiative proposal.”

Reclaim Idaho works hard to portray themselves as the voice of the moderate middle, a way a common sense option for citizens that reject both the left and the right. Make no mistake, they want to turn Idaho down the same dystopian path as Washington, California, and Colorado. The fact that they use ActBlue, an explicitly left-wing, Democrat-aligned organization, to process donations shows you which side they’re on.

At some point one must ask what exactly they are trying to reclaim. They are clearly working to advance a progressive agenda.

Reclaim Idaho used the initiative process to expand Medicaid in 2018, a decision which despite their promises now costs Idaho taxpayers billions of dollars and has made more working-age people dependent on government than ever.

They had an initiative ready to go last year that would have allocated hundreds of millions more dollars to the public school system, but withdrew it when Governor Little beat them to the punch with the special session.

Reclaim pretends to be nonpartisan, but their goal is clearly to turn Idaho blue. That goal is shared by supposed Republicans like Jim Jones, Patti Anne Lodge, and who knows how many more. A lot of moderate Republicans benefited from Democrats switching their affiliation for the 2022 primary. How many more will benefit if the partisan primary is abolished entirely?

The right of political parties to choose their own nominees is fundamental to American democracy. The first-past-the-post system has been the founding of American elections for centuries. The only reason for anyone to try to change these rules now is because they know they cannot win under the current system. I believe that Idahoans will soundly reject this scheme to steal our elections once and for all.