In Arizona, We Just Won a Major Victory Against Ranked-Choice Voting
A ballot initiative to muck up Arizona’s elections may not make it to November
Good news from the Grand Canyon State for anyone concerned with stopping the radical Left’s corruption of our elections.
On Aug. 23, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Smith v. Fontes that 40,000 duplicate signatures must be admitted as evidence in a lawsuit challenging an effort to add ranked-choice voting to the Nov. 2024 ballot (Prop. 140), overturning a lower court judge’s ruling.
Why does that matter? If that signature challenge is successful, it would disqualify Prop. 140 altogether and block the expansion of dangerous and chaotic ranked-choice voting pushed by professional activists.
Restoration of America, which launched Restoration News, played a key role in that victory with an amicus brief filed on behalf of the Voter Reference Foundation—part of our nationwide fight to defeat and roll back this assault on how Americans elect their leaders.
There’s still the matter of resolving the challenge to Prop. 140’s signatures. As it stands, the campaign behind Prop. 140 has gathered 409,474 valid signatures—after nearly 175,000 were thrown out as erroneous—but it needs at least 383,923 valid signatures to appear on the Nov. 2024 ballot, meaning 40,000 ineligible signatures is more than enough to put it below that minimum threshold.
Scot Mussi, president of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, explains:
All the duplicate [signatures] submitted to be removed were exact name and address matches that aligned with what was on the voter file. Under state law, you are only allowed to sign a petition once, so they should have been removed. Instead, thousands of people were allowed to sign the initiative petition sheets multiple times, and those signatures were counted.
(RELATED: Ranked-Choice Voting is for Communists… Literally)
Ranked Choice What?
If you’re confused about how exactly ranked-choice voting (RCV) works, well, that’s kind of the point.
For centuries, Americans have voted for one person to fill a single office, from mayor to president of the United States. Under RCV, though, voters are asked to vote for everyone on the ballot by ranking them from 1 to 5… or 6, or 10, or however many people are vying for a single position. If they don’t play by RCV’s confusing rules, they risk their ballot being trashed and their vote disenfranchised.
RCV leads to thousands of ballots being trashed for this exact reason—8,000 in Maine in 2018 and 15,000 in Alaska in 2022, respectively. In both instances, voters cast more ballots for Republican candidates, who split the vote and helped Democrats win in conservative races.
The far-left group behind RCV, FairVote, boasts that its election “reforms” would clinch 2 more Democrat congressional seats in red Georgia. Why? Because leftists view RCV as a weapon for helping Democrats conquer red states where they don’t have a shot at winning under the current rules.
Out-of-state “dark money” groups outspent local conservatives 3–1 to narrowly enact Alaska’s RCV ballot measure in 2020 by fewer than 3,800 votes, something they’re keen on doing in Arizona this year. Yet activists oppose RCV in Washington, D.C., because they fear it would confuse Democratic voters and so “undermine the strength of Democrats” in the district.
Conservatives can’t afford to give an inch to these ideologues. Here’s looking forward to an RCV defeat in Arizona.
(READ MORE: Trump Judges Just Saved Arizona from Non-Citizen Voting… and America With It)
