A new frontier? How Alaska’s elections could show what’s to come for Nevada’s

Though at a smaller scale than the crowds who flock to the glittering lights and jingling slot machines of Las Vegas, tourists walk around downtown Anchorage, zipped up in light jackets in 60-degree August weather. They hop into souvenir shops that sell sweaters, hats and figurines of Alaska’s animals, and they take pictures with the bear statues set up around town.

Alaska’s soft greens and blues are a sharp contrast to Las Vegas’ rocky mountains, which burst with reds, oranges and purples at sunset, the desert landscape spotted with yucca and creosote.

Politically, though, the two states are more similar than it might appear. The states — both viewed as either a last frontier or the Wild West — have a large percentage of nonpartisan voters, many holding libertarian values. And soon, their election processes could become fraternal twins.

Alaskans are debating whether to keep in place their new election system of open primaries and ranked-choice voting. Meanwhile, Nevadans will vote on whether to try the system for themselves.

Nevada’s Ballot Question 3 was passed by state voters in 2022 by 6 percentage points. If it passes again in November, it would amend the Nevada Constitution by replacing the current closed-primary system with nonpartisan open primaries and a ranked-choice, general election voting system for statewide, congressional, U.S. Senate and state legislator elections starting in 2026.

Currently, Nevada’s nonpartisan and minor-party voters cannot participate in Democratic and Republican primaries. Under Question 3, all voters — regardless of affiliation — would participate in primaries that make all candidates from all parties go head-to-head. The top five finishers in a primary would advance to the general election.

In the general election, ranked choice kicks in. If a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes, that candidate wins. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the second-choice candidate on those ballots is counted instead. That process repeats until a single candidate reaches more than 50 percent support.

Supporters of Nevada’s Question 3 say the process will allow the state’s nonpartisans, who as of July make up 34 percent of the state’s active registered voters, to participate in the primary process and make way for more moderate, down-the-middle candidates. Opponents argue the system would cause mass confusion and disenfranchise voters.

In Alaska, the ranked-choice voting system, which passed by fewer than 4,000 votes, has its fair share of supporters and critics. A survey conducted last year by Alaskan pollster Ivan Moore showed a repeal effort narrowly passing.

Similarly in Nevada, it’s a close battle between supporters and opponents.

Alaska’s birth of ranked-choice voting

Elections attorney Scott Kendall, who wrote the 2020 ballot measure to implement Alaska’s new voting system, said ranked-choice voting never held a big appeal for him. Rather, he wanted to implement an open primary system, and he felt ranked-choice voting was the necessary pairing.

Two-thirds of Alaskan voters don’t affiliate with either of the two major parties, and in the 2022 election, more than 50 percent of voters split their ticket, Kendall said as he sat in his downtown office with a view of the bay. On some days, he can watch belugas swim in the distance.

Kendall said his “watershed moment” was when sitting GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost her primary in 2010 by 2,000 votes to a tea party-backed Republican. She ran as a write-in candidate and won the general election by about 10,000 votes.

It was only the second time in U.S. history that a write-in candidate won a U.S. Senate race. The first time was in 1954, when Strom Thurmond ran as a write-in for U.S. Senate in South Carolina after the sitting senator died.

That 2010 election showed that primaries produce candidates who aren’t necessarily what voters want, Kendall said. While working with the Alaska Legislature, he saw a gridlocked, partisan body that was unable to solve its perennial budget issues, while legislators would confide they wanted to support something but feared losing their primary, he said.

“I think the old system was based on the fallacy that everyone lines up for the red team or the blue team, and that everyone has a strong preference between the two teams,” Kendall said.

How Alaskans feel

At the Alaska State Fair in Palmer, around 45 miles northeast of Anchorage, people milled about the stalls, eating ice cream, crab legs and popcorn. Among the Ferris wheel and rides, festivalgoers could pay to pet dog sledding puppies and drink local Alaska beer. Both the Alaska Democratic and Republican parties had booths set up, ready to educate and talk with voters.

Justin Warren, wearing a colorful umbrella hat, said once he did the reading and watched a two-minute video on ranked-choice voting, he found the system straightforward.

“It’s a way to get the people’s voice heard a little bit more,” the Anchorage resident said. “I think it’s a way to make sure that everybody’s voice is counted for, their vote is counted, even if it’s not necessarily for the person you wanted it to be.”

Addy Ahmasuk, a resident of Nome, located in far west Alaska, about 100 miles south of the Article Circle, likes ranked-choice voting, although she has not voted under the new system yet. She said a Native voters group sent out information on what ranked-choice voting looks like. She got to practice using ranked-choice, and she didn’t find it confusing.

“It was helpful to kind of go through it,”Ahmasuk said.

Back in Anchorage, at an eclectic house with a “Mary Peltola for Congress” sign in their yard, Wendy Isbell and John Farleigh explained how they like the new election system.

Isbell, who works for the U.S. Census Bureau, said she found the process easy to understand once it was explained to her. She liked the idea that she can vote for who she wants, regardless of their party.

“It depowers the parties,” said Farleigh, a retired commercial fisherman dressed in a tie-dye T-shirt and flannel. “Republicans are against it, but they don’t know how to use it. … They don’t understand that they should campaign together.”

At the Alaska Native Heritage Center, people strolled around Lake Tiulana and studied replicas of traditional dwellings as Michelle Sparck, director of strategic initiatives for the nonpartisan voter education group Get Out the Native Vote, recited the pitch she gives to Alaskan Natives to encourage them to vote: Alaska Natives make up one of every four registered voters, but they’re not voting like it, she said.

“We’re going to have a government with or without our participation,” she said. “We might as well have a representative government.”

Sparck said the closed primary stood as a barrier for the state’s Alaska Native community, who are much more likely to split their tickets between different parties than the rest of the state.

Alaska Natives historically have struggled with voter participation. But their participation rose during the special 2022 House primary relative to 2020 and 2018, according to a report from Get Out the Native Vote. In October 2023, the Alaska Federation of Natives, representing more than 170 tribes, voted to endorse and preserve open primaries and ranked-choice voting.

“We’re just glad to see a lot more engagement and participation and a different approach to elections than we’ve experienced for decades before,” Sparck said.

Kenneth Bradshaw, however, thought his ballot was too confusing.

“I’m not a college graduate, and I’m getting older, so I don’t want to keep learning stuff,” the 84-year-old longtime Alaska resident said. “I just simply vote one time for one person that I want in there, and if he makes it, OK. If he don’t, that’s fine too.”

Bradshaw, wearing a Trump hat and a flannel while sitting in his armchair as a Steller’s jay pecked at corn outside the window of his Anchorage home, said he doesn’t see any reason why the voting system changed.

“We’ve been voting this way for 200 years. Why change now?” Bradshaw said. “I can’t see the good in ranked-choice voting.”

Repeal efforts

When Bradshaw’s grandson, Phil Izon, learned that his grandfather and other older people were confused by the new system, he worked to get it repealed with Art Mathias, an Anchorage resident who owns an insurance business and likes to fly planes, hunt and fish in his free time.

The two gathered about 42,000 signatures and fought multiple legal battles to keep their proposed repeal of ranked choice voting on the ballot. They call their effort a “David and Goliath” story; the pro-ranked-choice group raised $4.5 million in August to keep the system in place.

The Alaska Division of Elections, which did not respond to multiple interview requests, has spent $3.5 million since 2021 on the system, including education outreach. The total cost to operate the election was $11 million in the 2022 election, a sharp increase from the $3.3 million that the average election cost from 2010 to 2020, Izon said.

Izon, Mathias and other critics say ranked-choice voting decreases voter turnout, costs more money and disenfranchises voters who don’t make use of the ranking system.

They said ranked-choice voting has led to voter disenfranchisement when voters “exhaust” their ballots by only voting for one candidate instead of ranking them all. If the race goes to a second round of counting, and the candidate they chose was the lowest vote-getter, their ballot is “exhausted,” because it doesn’t include more candidates to count in the race.

“Most people don’t know you can vote wrong now. You can vote in a way that has your ballot thrown out,” said Izon, director of Alaskans for Honest Elections. “You can’t assume voters are knowledgeable election experts.”

In the 2022 Alaska Senate race, more than 9,000 ballots were exhausted after the third round of tabulating, according to data from the Alaska Division of Elections.

Marcus Moore, a 39-year-old Anchorage resident, originally voted for the system. He thought it would be faster and cheaper. But after learning more about it, he decided it wasn’t a good idea, he said, sitting in his basement, where he produces a conservative podcast called Alaskan Rants with young protégés.

In many races, there are more Republican candidates than Democrats, and those Republicans end up splitting and diluting those votes, Moore said. Republican candidates are also splitting party campaign funds, while a single Democratic candidate gets all its party’s donations, he said.

Another criticism is the increased risk of voters making mistakes on their ballots.

Data has shown a higher error rate when voting with a ranked-choice ballot. A December 2023 study from the University of Pennsylvania that looked at 3.09 million ballots in 165 races in Alaska, Maine, San Francisco and New York City found that nearly 1 in 20 voters improperly marked their ballots in at least one way.

In the special June 2022 primary in Alaska, around 7,500 ballots were rejected, representing around 4.6 percent of total ballots — double the rate in Alaska’s 2020 primary, before ranked-choice voting and open primaries began. The biggest reason was a lack of a required witness signature on ballots, according to the Alaska Division of Elections.

Alaska saw abysmal turnout in its most recent primary election, in August, when only three races, one of which was statewide, were on the ballot. Around 17.3 percent of voters participated, according to data from the Division of Elections.

Proponents say it’s difficult to get voters to pay attention to August elections, with many people using the short summer season to fish, hunt and prepare for winter. Critics, however, say the low turnout can be attributed to the confusion brought by ranked-choice voting, and they say there is less motivation for Alaska voters to turn out in primaries, knowing that the top four candidates will automatically go forward to the general election.

In the November 2022 election, 267,000 voters cast ballots, representing 44.4 percent of registered voters, according to the Division of Elections. In 2016, voter turnout was 60.8 percent.

The state’s implementation of its automatic voter registration in 2017 increased the number of registered voters from 525,000 in 2017 to 608,000 as of September 2024, affecting voter turnout statistics, according to the Division of Elections.

Alaska takes a long time to release its results, which critics point to as another disadvantage of the system. But the massive state — more than twice the size of Texas — has always taken days to release its election results, because extreme weather affects the delivery of ballots. The state allows 15 days for ballots to come in before they are counted. The tabulation under ranked-choice voting takes only seconds, Kendall said.

How the candidates feel

Alaska’s sole U.S. representative, Democrat Mary Peltola, became the first Alaska Native to serve in federal office in 2022. She ran among nearly 50 other candidates during the special nonpartisan primary and made it through to the general election as one of the top candidates.

She wouldn’t have succeeded under the old system, the congresswoman said.

Peltola said ranked-choice voting gives candidates an incentive to be less harsh with their opponents because they have to court those candidates’ supporters for their second-choice vote. The nonpartisan primary helps elect candidates who are not entrenched in ideology, she said.

“We need people who are open to compromise and consensus, and we’re only going to get that if we have a system where we don’t have to go through a party to get on the ballot,” Peltola said.

Republican State Sen. Cathy Giessel was ousted during the 2020 primary by a party loyalist, and though she originally opposed ranked-choice voting, she decided to run again in 2022 and embrace it.

She didn’t purchase the voter database that candidates use to learn voters’ addresses and party affiliation, Giessel said. Instead, she started knocking on every door in her district, not knowing any voter’s party.

“I talked to a huge diversity of people, people whose doors I had walked past previously because we had partisan primaries,” Giessel said. “It completely changed how I went door-to-door.”

She knocked on the door of one voter who was a Democrat, and they identified a long list of things they agreed on, Giessel said. She told him that she respected that he would vote for a Democrat, but she asked him if he could choose her as his second choice.

Giessel was ahead with around 33.8 percent of the vote at the end of Election Day. When the second-choice votes were reallocated from the third-place candidate, she defeated the opponent who had beat her in 2020 with 57 percent support, Giessel said.

“This gives you a chance to really hear fresh ideas from all perspectives of the political spectrum, and that is a very rich experience. You just learn so much talking to everyone,” she said. “And if you are that kind of candidate that is willing to work with everyone, you don’t have to keep worrying whether the political party is going to throw you under the bus and primary you.”

Other Alaska officeholders didn’t see benefits in campaigning under the new system. Alaska Republican Rep. Sarah Vance won her 2022 election under the new system, but her constituents felt frustrated by it. She encouraged people to get out and vote anyway and name her as their No. 1 pick, she said.

Voters feel overwhelmed with the amount of information they have to take in just to make a sound decision on a candidate, Vance said.

“This isn’t about party lines,” said Vance, who proposed a bill in the state Legislature to repeal ranked-choice voting. “This isn’t about trying to get more moderate candidates. If you are a candidate who knows your district, and you work hard to serve the people and govern well, then you can win.”

Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X.