EDITORIAL: With ranked choice voting, does Alaska still need primaries?

Even by the adjusted standards of a non-general election, Alaska voters’ participation in last Tuesday’s primary was anemic. Several factors were at play, of course: Other than the high-profile U.S. House race between Rep. Mary Peltola, Nick Begich III and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, there were few major draws on the ballot — and even the House race lacked the high drama of 2022′s special primary, where dozens of candidates were whittled to just four, or its general election, where Alaskans selected a candidate not named Don Young to Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat for the first time in almost 50 years.

Most of all, though, the biggest contributor to the lackluster primary election turnout was likely its lack of serious consequences. In selecting a better method to elect candidates — ranked choice voting — Alaska has unintentionally removed most of the stakes and necessity of contests prior to the November general election.

Under the state’s open primary system, instituted by the same ballot measure that gave us RCV, Alaska voters select the candidate they like best in the primary, similar to the old system (but with all candidates on the same ballot), and the top four vote-getters in each race move on to the general election. But nearly all races except statewide ones have fewer than four candidates anyway, so the practical impact of the primary is nil. To be sure, there were a few races where the primary had a winnowing effect — in Eagle River’s Senate seat, for instance, former Rep. Sharon Jackson was the red-lantern finisher among five candidates and was thus knocked out. Similarly, in a wide-open race for House District 36 in the rural Interior, Libertarian candidate James Fields came in fifth and won’t be on the November ballot. And in the aforementioned U.S. House race, eight also-rans who cumulatively secured just more than 2% of the vote were eliminated. But those were the only races that were affected by the primary — a tiny fraction of the 51 total races on Alaska ballots.

Given the lack of paring-down in nearly all races, the principal utility that Alaska’s primary election has at this point is as a massive free poll for candidates and (if they have them) the parties that support them, giving them a sense of the state of the race three months before it’s actually contested. But the reality is that the data provided isn’t altogether predictive of future election returns — primary voters tend to be more motivated and more partisan than general election voters, so their preferences may not line up well with how things will go when the seats are decided. Other voters will be motivated to turn out in the general election by the presidential contest. And as RCV lets us rank all of the candidates who emerge, there’s less turnout incentive for primaries — even if a screwball or two ends up among the field, it’s a problem easily remedied by ranking other candidates higher. Sure, it’s interesting to see how people feel about the candidates in the race a few months out, but does that justify the expense of an entire election? If campaigns and parties want that information, it would make more sense for them to pay for polls rather than Alaskans doing the work (and shelling out public money to cover the cost) for them. Indeed, in some races — most notably the U.S. House race — we’ve seen candidates drop out in order to elevate a single candidate from one party. If the parties find utility here, we should be willing to ask ourselves: Should Alaskans fund an election just to help the parties get organized? The parties should fund and conduct that activity themselves if it’s useful for them.

There are a few edge cases where primaries would still have clear usefulness to Alaska voters — for instance, if candidate numbers skyrocketed to the point that ballots in November became unwieldy (say, if many races turned into the free-for-all of the 2022 U.S. House special primary), though that hardly seems likely. Even if six or seven candidates were on the general election ballot, ranking the top four would still easily decide elections, and it’s hard to imagine any race outcomes changing. Another low-likelihood scenario would be if bad actors registered candidates with similar names to a legitimate candidate in an attempt to confuse voters — but that’s a scenario that the status quo (or, for that matter, the old voting system) doesn’t guard against, either.

Alaska’s short history with ranked choice voting has so far been a strong success, giving candidates an incentive to consider the preferences of all their constituents, not just the party faithful. The system has been called “instant-runoff” voting because of the ability to consider voters’ second, third and fourth choices instantaneously. Now it’s increasingly looking like it might have the secondary benefit of removing the need for the state to pay for an additional statewide election every year.