Out-of-State Dark Money is Keeping Ranked-Choice Voting Alive in Alaska

Alaskans are tired of the failed ranked-choice voting scheme. But with over $12 million in out-of-state funding from “progressive” donors, the road to repeal will be uphill all the way

New polling from Alaska Survey Research shows the future of ranked-choice voting (RCV) in the state hangs by a thread with momentum going toward the “Yes on 2” repeal campaign. This has created desperation among “dark money” liberals who have dumped over $12 million into the campaign to keep RCV, including $4.4 million from a single donor on October 1.

These “dark money” groups and Democratic activists understand that keeping the failed RCV system is Democrats’ only shot at keeping the state’s House seat currently held by Rep. Mary Peltola (D). In 2020—the first year Alaska implemented RCV—Peltola’s second-preference votes sent her to Congress, despite Democratic candidates receiving far fewer votes than the Republicans, who split their vote and lost.

“You can see that the ‘No on 2’ group trying to preserve RCV is very nervous, which is why they just took in another $4.4 million from an outside group that has no obvious connection to Alaska,” Suzanne Downing, founder of the conservative news website Must Read Alaska, told Restoration News.

As we’ve written, out-of-state “dark money” bought RCV in Alaska by outspending opponents 12–1 in 2020, yet barely won by fewer than 3,800 votes. Unhappy with the results, Alaskans placed RCV repeal on the ballot, once again setting off a tsunami of out-of-state “dark money” funding to drown out their voices—and keep Peltola in office.

RCV is a convoluted, “political scientist-approved voting” process in which all the candidates run in a single primary, and the top candidates—the top 4 in Alaska’s case—head to the general election. Voters then vote for all 4 candidates by ranking them from favorite (1) to least favorite (4). If no candidate wins a majority on the first count, the last place finisher is eliminated. Then votes are compared from among voters’ second choices and so on until someone receives a majority—an intentionally confusing process that drives down voter turnout and drives away engaged conservatives.

This confusion was key to Peltola’s unlikely win in 2022, since many Republican voters voted for just one GOP candidate while Democrats united around a single Democrat, who ultimately prevailed despite receiving fewer votes than the Republicans did.

Proponents of this system argue that it keeps plurality candidates from winning who may receive as little as 34 percent of the vote. But the RCV system doesn’t fix this. In the RCV system, the winner is still not most voters’ first choice.

Democratic voters tend to be fickle in their support of RCV, depending on whether they think it helps them win elections.  For instance, they support it in heavily Republican Alaska but oppose it in heavily Democratic Washington, D.C., because they fear it would confuse their voters and undermine the party in the nation’s capital.

Downing said that after skeptical Alaskan Democrats saw how RCV helped Peltola win, many warmed to the idea. One Democratic voter told Alaska Public Media that she was initially leery, but after Peltola won, she concluded: “I can’t really argue with the results we’ve seen.”

(READ MORE: Lawsuit—Key Pennsylvania County Must Provide Paper Ballots to Voters in Major Election Integrity Victory)

Outspent 100 to 1

No on 2’s top three top contributors are all liberal, out-of-state mega-donors. They include former Enron trader John Arnold’s Houston-based Action Now Initiative (ANI); Article IV, in Arlington, Virginia, whose board includes Arnold representative Sam Mar; and Denver-based Unite America PAC.

Article IV is the “dark money” bundler that gave the last-minute $4.4 million injection.

Unite America formerly called itself “the Centrist Project,” but in reality supports liberal causes. Its primary donor is Kathryn Murdoch, media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s daughter and wife of liberal mega-donor James Murdoch.

Downing noted that deep-pocketed political entrepreneurs frequently use Alaska as a testing ground because of the state’s cheap media market, which allows their donations to go further.

“The amount they are spending is truly historic in Alaska, rivaling some of the biggest ballot measure battles in state history,” said Downing. “The amount they’ve raised—$12.3 million—that’s more than Peltola has raised for reelection, and she’s running the most expensive congressional race in Alaskan history.”

Unite America board member Katherine Gehl sold her family’s $250 million food business to dedicate her life to spreading RCV across the nation. Before becoming an RCV evangelist, she was a donations bundler for former President Barack Obama. She considers herself a “rational centrist,” much the way the liberal media considers Obama a centrist. She became a true RCV believer when she saw how effective conservatives were at winning Republican primaries and stopping Obama’s agenda during his second term.

She told Notre Dame Magazine that RCV liberates elected officials from the “tyranny” of the party primary system. In other words, it frees Republican politicians from having to be accountable to conservative voters.

Gehl was the first significant donor to No on 2, giving $100,000 from her Final Five Fund (FFF) after the group’s campaign manager and treasurer donated less than $50 combined.

No on 2 has since outspent the repeal side 100–1.

As of October 11, the anti-repeal campaign had spent $7.8 million and had $4.5 million cash on hand. Nearly all of its donations have come from outside Alaska.

If RCV is So Great, Why Spend Millions Convincing Alaskans to Keep It?

Downing writes that the RCV push in Alaska originally came from surrogates of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) “to get her around the Republican primary election, which she was no longer able to win.”

Downing told Restoration News that she doesn’t know who solicited who, the Murkowski surrogates—led by infamous Never Trumper Scott Kendall—or their out-of-state mega-donor allies, but “they found each other” at an opportune moment.  

Gehl claimed in a 2021 CNN op-ed that Kendall—then a Republican political operative who had worked for Murkowski—discovered RCV from a Harvard Business School report she co-authored. She argued that thanks to Kendall successfully implementing RCV, Murkowski “has been empowered” to “speak out early and forcefully against the Capitol building insurrection and vote to convict former President Donald Trump in his Senate impeachment trial.”

In 2021, Gehl gave Murkowski the maximum legal individual campaign contribution.  

Gehl claims that nothing in the 2022 Alaskan elections under RCV rules disproves her “politics-industry theory,” that applying industrial rules of competition to elections works. She could only draw that conclusion if she considers RCV a tool to get Murkowski and Peltola elected and ignores how sloppy Alaska’s RCV experiment has been.

Voter turnout in 2022 dipped to 51 percent, the lowest since 1976, likely owing to the overall confusion of RCV. Phillip Izon II, the leader of the repeal campaign, cites his grandfather’s bewilderment over the complicated process as the reason he got involved in its repeal.

Even Julie Lucky, No on 2’s campaign manager, admits that only 70 percent of voters bothered to rank candidates.

In Alaska’s current congressional race, RCV allowed Eric Hafner, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in New York until 2036 and has never lived in the state, to make it to the general election. 

Izon correctly sums up Alaska’s fight to repeal RCV as “a David and Goliath story.” Despite being bombarded with pro-RCV ads, Alaskan voters are hungry to get their election system back, as evident in the repeal drive and strong support in the polls for repeal.

Alaskans for Honest Elections gathered over 60 percent more than the required number of signatures to place repeal on the ballot—enough to proof it against the legal challenge it faced from three Leftist plaintiffs whom Kendall represented.

Tellingly, the day after the Alaska Supreme Court dashed their litigation hopes, on August 22, ANI ploughed $2 million into No on 2.

(RELATED: Ranked-Choice Voting is for Communists. Literally.)

Same Mega-Donors, Different State

Each state that has held a referendum on RCV has faced the same out-of-state mega-donors tilting the odds in their favor. Meanwhile, opposition remains scant or absent.

In Oregon, for instance, Unite America, Article IV, FairVote, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and other “dark money” liberal groups are pouring millions of dollars into that state’s pro-RCV ballot initiative. The only opposition comes from 16 concerned county clerks who have raised a total of $1,000.

Arnold donated $1 million each to Maine and New York City’s successful RCV initiatives.

In Massachusetts, he gave $3.4 million through ANI to the pro-RCV Yes on 2 Committee, which raised 84 percent of its nearly $10 million budget from outsiders—90 percent of it coming from just 19 donors. 

Former Republican Secretary of the Commonwealth candidate Anthony Amore led the state’s successful rejection of RCV at the ballot.

“Simply put, we were effective at explaining that RCV is far too complicated, discriminatory, and ineffective,” he told Restoration News.

The public could see right through the fact that it isn't democratic at all. I think that the voters know they don't have time to study up on a long list of candidates and then rank them. And they had just seen that Maine's recent congressional election resulted in the loser being named the winner. 

Maine is the only state other than Alaska that has adopted RCV.

What Do RCV Mega-Donors Want?

Support for RCV in the donor class doesn’t fall neatly along partisan lines, but it does fall along ideological lines. They are solidly left-of-center elitists who aim to prevent conservative voters from electing conservative Republicans in general elections.

Like Gehl—who came into too much money, needed a hobby, and decided to form her own political theory and tinker with democracy—the pro-RCV mega-donors express frustration with the two-party system and want to bypass it.

In April 2019, Arnold wrote in a Houston Chronicle op-ed that democracy was in crisis because of the dysfunction of the two-party system. Article IV claims that the two-party system has collapsed because “few general elections remain competitive.”

But competitive general elections have never been a prerequisite for good governance or fair elections in the U.S. Millions of Americans live near likeminded voters by choice or happenstance.

For “dark money” liberal elites, RCV is an investment. The more states enact it, the less money they’ll have to spend long-term to get their “centrist” candidates past pesky grassroots primary voters.

Gehl claims the best thing about RCV-elected officials is that “[they] leave the particularly partisan issues to the side.”

This may be what liberal globalist capital prefers, but it’s bad for voters and goes against America’s republican form of democracy.

Historically, American voters force political issues onto the parties—not the other way around. With RCV, a small number of wealthy elites are trying to force an entirely new electoral system on voters, which drives down voter turnout and drive away candidates whom the voters want.

“As I said often,” Amore told Restoration News, "RCV is when you care enough to elect the second best.”

(READ MORE: Ranked-Choice Voting is on the Ballot in 8 States, Thanks to “Dark Money” Mega-Donors)

Jacob Grandstaff is an Investigative Researcher for Restoration News specializing in election integrity and foreign affairs/national security. He graduated from the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.

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