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

It’s no coincidence that 8 states have ballot initiatives establishing ranked-choice voting this year. Here’s the lead organization fueling that astroturf campaign.

This November, voters across America will cast their ballot for the next leader of the free world. But in 8 states—Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Alaska, Colorado, South Dakota, Oregon, and Idaho—voters will also decide the future of elections for years to come, thanks to a set of ballot initiatives that are busily flying under most observers’ radar.

And that’s exactly how the “dark money” group behind this nationwide campaign, Unite America, likes it.

While 8 states permit ranked-choice voting in local races, just 2 states, Alaska and Maine, require it statewide elections—and Alaskans can’t wait to get rid of it. Yet if successful, Unite America and its allies on the professional Left could dramatically expand that figure to 6 more states if not stopped by voters this year. And that’s a huge problem for Americans already deeply divided and concerned with the integrity of their elections in the wake of the fraught 2020 election.

Here’s that stealth campaign in action.

Voting by the Numbers

If you’re confused by how ranked-choice voting (RCV) works, confusion’s the point.

When Americans vote, they’re used to choosing one candidate for a single office from a pool of two or three. Under RCV rules (sometimes called “final four/five” or instant runoff), voters are tasked with ranking as many as 5 candidates for one office from their most- to least-preferred. In other words, RCV forces voters to vote for every candidate—including those from parties they don’t wish to support.

RCV advocates point out that political parties, including the Republican Party, often use RCV for their primary or convention ballots. But these are partisan, internal votes where having a second-choice backup vote makes sense for voters determining which nominee will represent their party in the general election. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, for instance, won the ranked-choice nomination battle at the Virginia GOP’s 2021 convention. In Youngkin’s case, however, he would’ve won the most votes under a traditional system anyway; RCV had the same outcome.

That system becomes hairy when applied to general elections, where most Americans vote straight-ticket for either the Democrats or Republicans. Under RCV rules, if they don’t vote for every candidate for a single office from 1 to 5, they risk having their ballots trashed. Tabulators run the results through a series of rounds where the lowest vote-getter is dropped, then the next-lowest, and so on until a final winner emerges. If that loser happens to be your first choice—and you didn’t vote for a second- or third-choice candidate—your ballot will be trashed and your vote discarded.

Being disenfranchised by byzantine voting rules is the fastest way to discourage Americans—who already doubt their votes really matter—from ever voting again.

Nor are the outcomes necessarily predictable, which can make them untrustworthy. Election upsets happen. Yet in most races voters can guess which candidate will win. Theoretically, under RCV the ultimate winner is the first-, second-, or third-choice of most voters, advocates argue, creating consensus. In practice, the tabulation software used to calculate the winner under RCV rules is ill-understood and effectively a black box: Ballots go in and a winner emerges, sometimes an underdog who got well below 51 percent of the vote.  

Say there are 3 candidates for Alaska’s sole congressional seat, 2 Republicans and one Democrat. Everyone expects a Republican victory in this ultra-conservative state. The state’s RCV law requires voters to fill in the bubbles for all 3 individuals. But many Republicans end up choosing one of the GOP candidates as their favorite and not voting for the other Republican or the Democrat.

The result is that when all votes are counted, their ballots are discarded in the second round of counting—and the Democrat emerges the unlikely victor.

That’s exactly the scenario that happened in Alaska’s 2022 election, when more voters cast a ballot for Republicans but the lone Democrat, Mary Peltola, won because the Republican candidates split their votes. So ruby red Alaska, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964, was conquered by ranked-choice voting… bought and paid for by out-of-state special interests from Washington, D.C. and Colorado.

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

Swampy Unity

I’ve written extensively on the Beltway-based groups that devised RCV as a tool for chiseling out unlikely Democrat wins in solidly Republican states. That’s why the Left wants it in Georgia, a red state they aim to conquer, yet oppose it in deep-blue D.C., where the local Democratic Party fought against RCV because it would confuse black voters and “undermine the strength of Democrats” in the district.

For the same reason, the tiny Communist Party endorsed RCV in its 2024 platform—along with all of the Democrats’ election “reforms”—as key to the proletariat’s “struggle for democracy.” So did the Green Party, which supports RCV for “making elections more welcoming to alternative-party and independent candidates.”

As with many past campaigns, the Left’s vehicle of choice is the out-of-state “dark money” machine run by professional activists. The nationwide push for RCV was largely concocted by FairVote, a Maryland-based leftist group also behind the National Popular Vote scheme to abolish the Electoral College.

Now add one more to that list: Unite America, a Denver-based “dark money” group that’s funneling 5-, 6-, and 7-figure sums into ballot initiatives to expand RCV in 2024.

While Unite America presents itself as bipartisan, boasting a board evenly divided between squishy Republicans and Democrats—its founding name in 2013 was, in fact, “the Centrist Project”—its policy proposals are uniformly left-wing. Besides RCV, the group proposes automatic voter registration and all-mail voting, positions shared by the radical Brennan Center for Justice; but also opening party primaries to all voters, encouraging parties to meddle in one another’s elections to select the most beatable opponent (a tactic the Left has far excelled the Right in). Many of the RCV ballot initiatives up this year also include open primary provisions.

Unite America says that its policies would “reduce the influence of wealthy donors” in elections. But Unite America itself is the creation of ultra-wealthy, uniformly liberal donors.

As of Sept. 2024, the group’s PAC arm reported raising $17.4 million for the 2023–24 election cycle, most of it from a handful of well-heeled individuals & board members: Marc Merrill, co-founder of the esports company Riot Games (where he was accused of sexual harassment and discrimination against women); Berkshire Partners senior adviser Randy Peeler; Ben Walton, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton; Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank; and Kent Thiry, ex-CEO of DaVita and a major donor to Colorado leftist groups, among others.

Unite America’s most famous mega-funder (and board chair) is Kathryn Murdoch, daughter of media magnate Rupert Murdoch and wife of liberal mega-donor James Murdoch. Murdoch has donated at least $1.2 million to Unite America and another $5.3 million to its 501(c)(3) research arm through Quadrivium, the foundation she shares with her husband, James.

Other notable donors to Unite America’s (c)(3) arm include the Hopewell Fund, part of Democrats’ multi-billion-dollar “dark money” network run by Arabella Advisors, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the philanthropy of choice for “progressive” tech elites. Both of those groups are pass-throughs designed to obscure the original donors’ identities, leaving more questions than answers.

So far, so Left. As far as the group’s board, there’s an obvious tilt to the D.C. establishment: Carlos Curbelo, a liberal Republican ex-congressman who supported a failed tax on carbon dioxide emissions; Ben Goldhirsh, an investor in global warming projects like Lowercarbon Capital to “unf**k the planet”; former Kentucky Sec. of State Trey Grayson, a NeverTrumper, Jan. 6 true believer, and peddler of the Left’s “assault on democracy” hoax; and Sam Mar, who represents the liberal billionaire John Arnold. Democrat mega-donor Katherine Gehl, a top supporter of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, is also on the board.

Missing from the “bipartisan” board: Any genuine conservatives.

Similarly, Unite America has funneled contributions to “progressive” and anti-Republican groups like Bill Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together, the vote-by-mail group Unite Virginia, and Pennsylvanians Against Gerrymandering, whose proposed “independent” redistricting commission was backed by the liberal League of Women Voters. Represent.US, a group that’s received at least $500,000 from Unite America, aims to restrict free speech by changing campaign finance laws with funding from the Tides Foundation and other left-wing donors.

So where’s this money flowing?

(RELATED: Democrats' "Freedom to Vote Act" is the Death of Free Elections)

Nevada

In Nevada, Unite America is responsible for 100 percent of the $207,000 in contributions reported (as of writing) by Nevada Voters First, the main group behind the pro-RCV Question 3. If passed in November, that ballot initiative would advance the 5 candidates who receive the most primary votes to the general election and establish open primaries.

In practice, that means voters in this increasingly conservative state could nominate 3 Republicans, 1 Libertarian, and 1 Democrat to duke it out over a single office—say, governor—with out-of-state meddling from professional leftist groups, and almost certainly lose to the Democrat by splitting their votes. Republican Steve Sisolak only defeated incumbent Gov. Joe Lombardo (D) by 15,000 votes in Nevada’s tight 2022 gubernatorial election. With Question 3 in place, then, it isn’t hard to imagine a scenario in which Democrats unite around a single well-funded candidate while Republicans quarrel over 2 establishment squishes, an America First hard-liner, and a Libertarian wingnut, and Democrat lawyers like Marc Elias quietly sue to keep the Green Party off the ballot.

This year, the pro-RCV forces have spent just under $900,000 pushing Question 3; the “no” campaign has spent just $146,000 pushing back. And there’s every reason to believe it’ll pass, since Question 3 originally appeared on Nevadans’ 2022 ballot, where it passed 53–37 percent. (Nevada’s constitution requires constitutional amendments pass in two consecutive even-numbered years, like 2022 and 2024, to become law.)

The plot thickens, however. While out-of-state groups and donors like Unite America are pouring in record sums—$23 million in 2022, much of it from Represent.US, Unite America, and Unite America board member and Democratic mega-donor Katherine Gehl—Nevada Democrats are almost uniformly against Question 3. The Nevada Democratic Party, former Go. Steve Sisolak, U.S. Sens. Jacky Rosen, Catherine Cortez Masto, Rep. Mark Amodei, a host of local Democrats, and the local AFL-CIO all oppose Question 3. So does the “progressive” get-out-the-vote group Silver State Voices, part of the Left’s massive get-out-the-vote network run by State Voices in D.C.

Why? Because they believe RCV will make it harder for Democrats to hold onto power in Nevada.

Colorado

As with Nevada, Colorado Democrats don’t know what to think about Proposition 131, which would establish RCV in the state’s elections. A handful of former Democratic politicians, including ex-House Speaker Terrance Carroll, are for it. So are the Colorado League of Women Voters, the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, and Kent Thiry, a major Democrat donor and ex-CEO of the healthcare company DaVita.

Yet Colorado’s Democratic Party, Republican Party, and Green Party are all firmly against Prop. 131 for completely different reasons. The state GOP writes, “In extreme liberal Colorado, RCV ensures the most extreme Democrats prevail, and less conservative choices for office end up winning elected offices."

“Proposition 131 would reduce democracy in Colorado by reducing voter choice and increasing the influence of big money in politics,” says the Green Party, which thinks RCV isn’t extreme enough, preferring a proportional representation model instead.

Democrats, for their part, gave Prop. 131 a comment-free thumbs down. In May, Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed an omnibus bill into law (SB 210) that makes it harder to adopt RCV, though Polis himself has waffled on the RCV bits.

To date, Unite America (headquartered in Denver, recall) is responsible for 56 percent of the $8.4 million contributed to Colorado Voters First, the pro-RCV campaign, followed by another $1.4 million from Thiry, $1 million from Ben Walton, and $1 million more from Netflix founder Reed Hastings.

In contrast, their opposition has raised a meager $61,813 to fight back—just 0.7 percent of the pro-RCV campaign’s cash.

High Drama in Alaska

Unique on this list is Alaska, where conservatives are desperately trying to repeal the RCV law narrowly passed in 2020 with a tidal wave of out-of-state, left-wing “dark money” provided by—you guessed it—Unite America.

2020’s Measure 2 backer, Alaskans for Better Elections, outspent conservatives 12–1 yet won by fewer than 3,800 votes, receiving half of its $6.8 million budget from Unite America. Other donors included John Arnold and the leftist group FairVote.

That effort paid off by electing Democrat Mary Peltola to Alaska’s lone congressional seat in 2022, a victory “progressives” gleefully attributed to RCV. Now they’re gathering again to defend it, this time via lawfare.

In mid-2023, conservative groups led by Alaskans for Honest Elections began gathering signatures to repeal the state’s RCV law. They needed 26,705 signatures to qualify for the 2024 ballot; they reported nearly 43,000 in January.

Almost immediately, Alaskans for Better Elections filed a complaint to stop the effort. Flash forward to April 2024, when three Alaskan “progressives”—a Democrat political consultant, ex-president of the local NAACP, and the ex-president of the First Alaskans Institute—hired the attorney who led the 2020 Measure 2 victory to disqualify thousands of pro-repeal signatures.

A month later in May, judge Christina Rankin ruled that Alaskans for Honest Elections could “fix” its faulty petitions. In July, she reversed course, disqualifying many of the group’s petition books over process errors and ordering a deadline for election officials to determine whether Measure 2 would still qualify for the November ballot. Four days later, attorneys determined the repeal campaign had more than enough signatures to qualify. Finally, in August the Alaska Supreme Court ruled against the Left’s lawsuit. Now Measure 2 is plowing ahead to November.

At the same time, Democrats are scrambling to ask the Alaska Supreme Court to stop their own RCV disaster from wiping out Peltola this year.

In the August open primary, Peltola advanced alongside three Republicans—former Rep. Nick Begich, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dalhstrom, and Matthew Salisbury—until Dahlstrom and Salisbury quit the race to avoid splitting the Republican vote for Begich. That meant the race’s 5th- and 6th-place winners—who earned a grand total of 1,088 votes between them—will join the November ballot. That’s John Wayne Howe, an advocate for Alaskan independence from the United States, and Democrat Eric Hafner, currently serving the next 12 years in a New York federal prison for phoning in fake bomb threats to government offices.

Isn’t that RCV working as the Left intended, offering options to voters tired of billionaire-backed partisans and yearning for real diversity on the ticket? Apparently not, as Democrats are suing to remove Hafner from the ballot. The good news is there’s an easy fix: Repeal ranked-choice voting.

And there’s a good chance Alaskans will do just that. As of writing, Unite America has contributed a meager $37,500 to Alaskans for Better Elections, leaving local leftists to rely on a $60,000 injection from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, part of the multi-billion-dollar Arabella Advisors “dark money” machine in Washington, D.C.

Arizona Unease

In Arizona, victory may come down to gaming the system. Unlike the other initiatives on this list, Proposition 140 doesn’t establish ranked-choice voting (though it would allow open primaries) but rather allows “future law to determine how many candidates advance from the primary election”:

. . . and if future law provides that three or more candidates may advance to the general election for an office to which one candidate will be elected, voter rankings shall be used.

If that’s confusing, it’s just the start. In July, the pro-Prop. 140 group, Make Elections Fair PAC, submitted signatures to qualify for the November ballot. Reviewers discovered that 38,000 signatures were duplicates with the same name and address, which should have put the total number of valid signatures under the 383,923 minimum required by Arizona’s constitution. Later analysis revealed that 99 percent of all challenged signatures were duplicates, some by individuals who had signed it 5 times (and one person a whopping 15 times).

Conservative groups, spearheaded by Restoration of America and the Voter Reference Foundation, quickly sued to stop Prop. 140 from advancing. Yet when they presented the 38,000 duplicate signatures as evidence that the Prop. 140 campaign hadn’t met the minimum, a trial court judge ruled the thousands of signatures were inadmissible as evidence and “even if admissible, the exhibits did not satisfy Plaintiffs’ burden of proof.”

The Arizona unanimously disagreed. On Aug. 21, the high court concluded that duplicate signatures had to be rejected—blocking Prop. 140 altogether. Or so we thought.

Enter Superior Court judge Frank Moskowitz, who acknowledged the duplicate signatures yet ruled on Sept. 19 that Prop. 140 would, in fact, remain on the November ballot because the ballot-printing deadline had already passed on Aug. 23.

Arizona’s famously wild-eyed Sec. of State, Adrian Fontes (D), argues that not allowing Prop. 140 on voters’ ballots would disenfranchise them. Fontes—whose office verified the signatures—currently stands accused of “misus[ing] official resources to promote Proposition 140” as part of Save Democracy Arizona, a group backing the initiative with ties to Make Elections Fair.

So now the illegal ballot measure will appear on Arizonans’ ballot… but whether their votes will be counted remains up to the Arizona Supreme Court, which is expected to weigh in soon.

(RELATED: Trump Judges Just Saved Arizona from Non-Citizen Voting… and America With It)

The Swamp Strikes Back

Then there’s the overlooked RCV war in Montana, Idaho, and South Dakota, whose Republican legislatures banned ranked-choice voting last year.

Few states have been so blanketed in out-of-state political cash as Montana. But with most eyes on the U.S. Senate race, too little attention has been paid to the nearly $5 million that’s poured in from outside groups to pass the RCV Amendment 126 with zero organized opposition from conservatives.

To date, 85 percent of contributions to Montanans for Election Reform, the pro-RCV group, came from just 4 out-of-state groups: Unite America; Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund; Action Now, a Chicago group affiliated with the SEIU; and Article IV, a northern Virginia group whose board includes Sam Mar, the John Arnold representative who also sits on Unite America’s board. Which donors supplied those funds is anyone’s guess. But as of writing, there isn’t a single organization that’s stepped up to oppose RCV expansion in Montana.

Unite America is also responsible for 41 percent of the $961,000 budget for Idaho’s Proposition 1 RCV initiative, where conservatives haven’t even organized a campaign to oppose it, let alone spent money.

Things are only a bit better with South Dakota’s Amendment H to enact RCV. To date, South Dakota Open Primaries—not to be confused with “Open Primaries South Dakota,” run by the same people in 2018 with no success—has raked in $922,000, half of it from Unite America. While the state Republican Party wisely opposes the amendment as an unnecessary “California-style” innovation, the Vote No on H campaign hasn’t spent a dime fighting back as of writing.

So Where Are We Winning?

It isn’t all doom and gloom, however. Ranked-choice voting still faces hurdles in these ruby-red states that even a “dark money” tidal wave may find insurmountable. And in other places, conservatives have the Left on the run.

Before 2022, no state had prohibited RCV in elections. Then Tennessee and Florida banned it that year, followed by the three mountain states in 2023. Five more states—Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Kentucky—have banned RCV this year so far, with at least one more to go. Missouri voters will decide on a constitutional amendment banning RCV (Amendment 7) this November—after the Left’s initiative to enact RCV failed to make the 2024 ballot. (Notably, every Democrat in the legislature voted “no” or “present” on the bill that put Amendment 7 on the ballot.)

In total, Ballotpedia has tracked 45 bills across 20 states that would either ban or repeal RCV this year alone, compared with one state that adopted it: Maine. It’s likely to pass in Oregon, too, where Measure 117 has strong support from state Democrats, unions, and far-left activists. (Unite America has only poured $25,000 into this low-hanging fruit initiative.) But that’s not a given; deep-blue Massachusetts defeated an RCV initiative (Question 2) by nearly 10 percentage points in 2020 despite strong support from Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, and too many unions and activist groups to count. That after Unite America funneled $445,000 into the effort to boot.

Ultimately, RCV’s worst enemy are the voters themselves—which is why it’s destined for the dustbin in the long run. It’s rare to see groups on the Right and Left line up to bash something, but that’s largely the case with RCV.

The center-right Honest Elections Project calls RCV a “fad” that’s “finally ending.” The Heritage Foundation blasts RCV for letting so-called “’reformers’ . . . tinker with and manipulate our elections.” The conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation calls RCV “confusing, exhausting, and slow,” likening it to the absurd, unnecessarily complicated antics of the Lilliputian government in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. “Progressives are so tired of losing that they are willing to change the rules to disenfranchise their opposition,” the foundation adds.

But not all “progressives” are on board. Many establishment Democrats, including an election “reform” group run by the Arabella network, point out that it “heightens voter confusion,” “potentially decreases voter turnout . . . among low-income and low-education voters,” and harms “candidates of color.”

Washington Post associate editor Marc Fisher calls RCV a “bad idea” for Washington, D.C. elections “I’m not seeing a boatload of fairness to this,” he wrote. “Ranked-choice voting is so complicated that the text of [D.C.’s] proposed law runs to 2,326 words—much longer than this column—including 11 definitions of problems the system can create.”

And that’s what will ultimately kill RCV: Being caught in the middle between bitter Democrats fighting their own side and an increasingly unified Republican Party with a newfound zeal for safeguarding elections. Who will miss it?

(READ MORE: Meet the $2 Billion Coalition that Wants Non-Citizen Voting in Our Elections)