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Alaska adopted a new voting system in 2020 that is unique in the nation, but a ballot initiative in this year's election seeks to repeal it.

Should Alaskans support open primaries and ranked choice voting or reject it?

We'll hear from advocates on both sides right now on Alaska Insight.

Good evening.

The voting system that Alaskans approved in 2020 was first used in the 2022 special election to fill the remainder of the late Don Young's U.S. House seat.

In the upcoming November election.

Alaskans will vote to either reject or retain the system.

Tonight, we'll hear positions on either side of this ballot measure.

But before we get to that discussion, here are some of the top stories of the week from Alaska Public Media's collaborative statewide news network.

Recovery efforts are underway in Kotzebue after a storm and severe flooding on Tuesday destroyed buildings and forced 80 residents to evacuate their homes.

Emergency responders are trying to assess the damage as winter quickly closes in.

Officials say the flooding destroyed Kotzebue Dock, several roads and bridges, and dozens of structures at multiple subsistence camps.

The city's airport opened Wednesday night for limited flights after being closed for more than 48 hours.

State officials, the Alaska chapter of the Red cross and members of the Alaska National Guard are expected to arrive in the coming days.

Juneau city officials say they felt blindsided after Celebrity Cruises and the Gold Belt Alaska Native Corporation announced plans to develop a new cruise ship port on Douglas Island last week without consulting the city.

Juneau officials, including Mayor Beth Weldon, said they are extremely unhappy, even after the cruise line issued a formal apology for the lack of communication around the project.

According to Gold Belt, the companies hope to finish financial estimates and concept designs for the project by next spring and complete it during the 2027 cruise season.

Five new cargo carriers are being added to the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, which officials hope will help to expand the airport's cargo capacity.

The five new carriers were announced during a press conference at the airport on Thursday, and are expected to bring more traffic to an airport that has previously ranked as high as number three in the world for total tons of cargo going through.

Deputy Airport Director Terry Lynn South said Thursday that the new carriers are expected to bring an annual revenue increase of about $9 million to the airport, about a 7% bump.

You can find the full version of these and many more stories on our website.

Alaska public dot org, or download the Alaska Public Media app on your phone.

Now onto our discussion for this evening.

Ballot measure two seeks to repeal open primaries and ranked choice voting.

Alaska voters in 2020 approved a ballot measure that changed how we elect candidates.

It's hailed in some quarters as a way to moderate the hyper polarized politics embroiling the nation.

Yet it's unpopular among the state's conservatives.

Alaska Public Media's Liz Ruskin reports on the origins of ranked choice voting here, and why the right doesn't like it.

It was almost like being a venture capitalist or an inventor.

We actually had like a concept.

We had it put together.

Anchorage attorney Scott Kendall used to be chief of staff to Governor Walker for two years.

Kendall says he couldn't get legislators to move beyond the gridlock.

They all feared being primaried, you know, primary as a verb, that if they didn't toe the party line, they would get taken out.

And, you know, we we created a system that was designed for them to get reelected, but also designed for them to fail at their jobs.

So in 2018, Kendall started thinking of a way to open the primary.

He opted for a primary in which the top four candidates advanced to the general, and then he needed a way to narrow the field without creating a spoiler effect, where two candidates from the same party would split the vote and elect a competitor.

That's where rank choice came in.

Then, Kendall says he started seeking money to mount a ballot measure campaign.

I started looking for funding both inside the state, which we had a little bit of success, and then outside the state, but the ideas and the writing of the measure was all done here in Alaska by Alaskans.

The system is unpopular among conservatives.

For many, the problem is exemplified in the special election for U.S. House in 2022.

Ranked choice did not, in that case, eliminate the spoiler effect.

Let's look at the results in that race.

As you can see, Democrat Mary Pell Tola finished first, followed by Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich the third.

Opponents of the system point out that more Alaskans voted for the two Republicans combined than voted for the single Democrat.

For round two.

Begich finished last, so he was eliminated and his ballots are reexamined for the voters second choice.

If every Begich voter ranked Sarah Palin second, it would have looked like this.

But that's not what happened.

Instead, barely half of his voters chose Palin.

Second.

About a third chose Mary Pelton Tola.

Second.

And about a fifth of Begich voters did not rank a second candidate, so Paul Tola won.

That was the special election.

And then a similar thing happened in the regular election in November 2nd years ago.

Paul Tola got more first choice ballots than the other candidates.

And the second and third rankings didn't give Palin enough of a boost to overtake those lead.

The lesson many Republicans took from this is that it's bad to have two Republican candidates on the general election ballot.

For example, here's a voter we spoke to this summer, Ludmilla Mazie of Chugiak.

I'm a Republican, and, I definitely don't like rank choice.

I wish to get rid of the rank and choice.

It's complicated for the Republican Party.

Yeah.

In 2020, I supported the effort to keep it the way it was.

Keep our primary, keep the general election.

Let the parties make the decision.

One person who has changed his view is former U.S.

Senator Mark Begich, a Democrat who was a leading voice against ranked choice voting.

Begich worried, among other things, that the new system might mean Democratic candidates would be shut out of the general election.

Now, he believes it encourages candidates to be less polarized to campaign on who they are.

I have changed my view and I've seen it give voters much more choices.

The repeal measure will appear on the ballot as Ballot Measure two.

A yes vote would do away with the open primary and ranked choice voting, and replace them with party primaries and single choice general elections.

A no vote would keep the system that's been in use since 2022.

Reporting from Anchorage.

I'm Liz Ruskin.

Joining me tonight to make their case for whether to retain or repeal Alaska's new voting system is former lieutenant governor and former senator Lauren Lieberman, who is a spokesperson for the yes on two campaign to repeal the current system.

And Julie Lucki is the campaign manager for the no on two campaign that seeks to retain it.

Welcome, both of you.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah.

Thanks so much for being in here in person today.

So let's start with we just saw this video about ranked choice voting.

Julie, boiled down your position for us in about a minute or so.

Tell us what your top three reasons are for open primaries and ranked choice voting.

Well, my top one reason is, I am a nonpartisan and like 60% of Alaskans, I chose not to register with the The open an open primary ballot has been an Alaskan staple for most of the years we've been in statehood, and our current open primary system allows every single Alaskan to vote for any candidate on the ballot, so we don't have to choose a ballot.

Limit our choices.

We can vote for anybody we want, and we can also vote for people from a different party.

So if you like a Republican one race and independent one race, a Democrat, another race, our open primary allows you to do that.

And we saw a little over half, 52% of voters actually do that across parties in their primary ballot.

I think, reason number two would be that the open that ranked choice voting, allows us to eliminate the spoiler effect, which in which means basically, if you've got a few, you know, candidates that are aligned, the voters can rank their candidates in order of preference.

And what we see is the spoiler effect, which would be the candidate spoiler candidate, which is the candidate that gets the fewest amount of votes would be eliminated.

And then you look at those second choices are allocated against, for the other candidates.

And I think that that kind of fits our Alaskan.

We often have third party candidates.

We often have, you know, independent candidates and so that, that eliminating that spoiler effects allows voters to, to consolidate that support around a candidate that is competitive.

And I think, lastly, it's just the matter of putting making all of our elected officials accountable to all of their constituents.

And so one of the things that the the system does in itself, open prime minister ranked choice voting is moves that competitive race down to the general election.

So we used to have a lot of races that were decided in that primary.

And in a case where you might not be the same party as your elected official, really, sometimes you were left out of being able to vote on that elected official because they get taken out in that primary.

And so it allows more candidates, more of the voters to vote for candidates, regardless of what party they belong to.

All right.

Thank you for starting us off.

And please, Lieutenant governor, give us your top three reasons for why you think voters should reject this current voting system.

Well, a yes on two returns is exactly to what we were doing for the last 25 years before the change.

And then even before that, we essentially had a system very much like that.

And so it's not an unusual system at all.

It's not one that, you know, I hear it's, politics as usual.

Well, yeah, politics as usual.

That's the way just about.

Well, all states except for one.

Well, no, two with Alaska.

Do their elections.

And so, you know, after.

Well, I was against this in 2020 and I, you know, didn't campaign hard, but I, I spoke spoke out against it because I saw the danger.

What is the danger?

What is it?

Well, there's several dangers to it.

It's very it's convoluted.

It's complex.

It's confusing to people.

In fact, I was in the voting line just two days ago with my wife and a voter there saw me, recognize me, and pulled me aside and and asked questions about how to deal with ranked choice voting, you know, in that election.

And I explained to him that he didn't have to be on one if he didn't want to.

He could, but he said that choices is up to you, and it wouldn't invalidate his ballot if he if he didn't do it.

So what I want to do is, when I was in the legislature, I was in the Senate, we responded to the United States Supreme Court that said political parties have the right for association.

And and so what what we did at the time, we said, okay, parties can choose their their rules and the rules that, the Republican Party chose, which is what I'm a member of, was that it would allow everybody to vote in its primary except those who are registered to a party.

And and if they if any of those voters want to vote in the Republican primary 30 days before the election or more to register.

Yeah.

Just register as a nonpartisan or is not declared.

So then they have they can get access to the ballot.

Let me stay with you for a moment, sir.

Scott Kendall's first quote in the story.

He said the legislature would gridlock because lawmakers feared if they compromise, that they'd be ousted in a primary.

As he put it, the old system was designed for them to get reelected, but also designed for them to fail at their jobs.

Did you see that dynamic at work in the legislature that lawmakers weren't open to bipartisan compromise due to fear of being punished in a primary?

But I heard what he said on that, and it just shows me that he he's never been a legislator.

He's never gone through, what I have I spent 14 years in the legislature, you know, you're part of a caucus.

You're dealing with people, I, I knew how to go out and count votes and how to how to get votes.

I didn't always get them, but, I knew the process.

And there's just a lot of interpersonal interactions in the legislature to get things done.

And, you know it.

He may what may have happened is, you know, he was chief of staff to Governor Walker.

He may not have got what he wanted to get done in the legislature.

So he felt that that was gridlock.

But that really is the process that is used in the legislature.

And and, there was there's nothing wrong with that.

In fact, that is the legislative process.

All right.

Julie, to you, you referenced gridlock in the legislature and Congress as a reason to support open primaries and ranked choice.

How does that change Partizan politics in your mind?

So I think, you know, Lauren was actually a senator when I started as a as a baby staffer.

So we spent many, many years in the trenches together.

And I think that what I saw and I'm just going to bring up a couple of years as an example.

So what we saw kind of in the years leading up to, 2020, when we approved open primaries and ranked choice voting was we did see a lot of Partizan gridlock.

And we did see the phenomenon, what they call being primaried.

Right.

So there was a lot of arguments about the size of the permanent fund and about, long term fiscal plan.

We had declining oil prices and we had a session that started.

And I'll just talk about the Alaska House.

Right.

It's been fairly even for a while, you know, 23 Republicans.

And then a mix of Democrats and independents or maybe 21.

And what we saw was a legislature that did not get organized for a record 31 days, and that was that Partizan fighting of who would be the speaker of the House.

And I think it's very similar to what we saw in the US Congress just recently.

After not organizing for 31 days, they had two special sessions, 59 days, and one of them actually organized with a third of the legislature in Wasilla.

And, it's hard enough to get legislators to come to the table when they're in one town, but impossible to to really work on that long term fiscal plan.

Eventually, we had some legislators kind of cross that aisle and decide to make a deal and negotiate.

And what we saw in 2020 is that primary is what Mr. Kendall is talking about, where legislators that had crossed that aisle were then, targeted in that closed Republican primary.

We had ten sitting legislators targeted.

And I don't think that any legislators deserve to have their job because they're incumbents.

But I do believe, as I was saying earlier, that all of the constituency, even if you're not a Republican, should be able to, to to vote on whether or not that person is retained.

And so if I'm understanding correctly, what you're saying is you saw signs of more compromise in the legislature because they didn't have to worry about that.

Compromising would mean they'd lose to a more Partizan challenger in the primary.

Is that correct?

That's correct.

And we did see that in 2020, where there were in that close primary, incumbents that were that crossed the aisle were losing the race by by a very small margin.

And then were not able to stand up for election without a constituency in the general.

And so, I mean, do you think that legislative gridlock is a problem in Juneau and that the closed primary discourages lawmakers from compromise?

Well, I've heard no three times, twice from Julie and no one's from you that it was a closed primary.

It was not a closed primary.

It's a it's a it was an open primary or you can say a semi-open.

It was open to all voters.

80% of the voters of Alaska, except for those who chose to be registered to another party.

That makes a lot of sense.

I mean, I'm here basically today to defend a yes on two, you know, rather than the decisions the Republican Party is making about.

It's its ballot.

But that is the decision that it made and, and worked under for 25 years and the no.

One two campaign has misrepresented what that is, misrepresented what it would be intended to do in the future, and is is essentially using people like first responders and veterans and others like that, the people we love and really appreciate, using them as, you know, to, essentially scare them that they might not, not have the right to vote.

That's just absolutely not true.

And so, yeah, you know, is there gridlock in Congress and in the legislature?

Of course, that is that is part of our, the process that we have.

And eventually we have to compromise, to build consensus, to, to get something passed.

I called it the rule of 2111 and one, you have to get 21 votes in the House, 11 the Senate and the governor to be able to get anything passed.

All right.

Julie, Warren just said that, no one to campaign is using scare tactics.

I want you to respond to that.

And then I want to ask you next question.

Well, and I'll, I'll, agree with Loren.

Is it in in this respect?

Is that, that it is.

We call it a closed primary, but it is really a party rule primary.

So really the party gets to decide how open or close it is.

Said the Republican Party has in the past allowed non partizans and undeclared, to participate in that primary.

But when you look at the actual language that's in the statute, it is based on the party rule.

So at any point, any party can choose to close the ballot to undeclared and nonpartisan voters, based on the statute, the way the ballot measure two is written.

And what we have heard from the backers of Ballot Measure two is that they would like to see a closed primary where Republicans vote for Republicans and Democrats, but for Democrats.

And that's where it as a nonpartisan, at the very least with the party, well, primary, I did have my choices diminished.

I could either choose to take part in a Republican primary which only had Republican candidates, or take part in that other primary.

And I think that concern is that precedent.

You know, we've seen a lot of unprecedented things happen, and we've seen a lot of what we considered settled precedent change in the last few years.

And so I think just looking at how things have happened in the past is not necessarily an indicator of what's happening in the future.

And again, the plain language of the statute that's being put into place would allow that to happen.

And we've seen the discussion of closing that primary.

So we heard during the story that we listened to and also Lauren referenced that, and Julie, I'm sure you've heard criticism that the new voting system is confusing, that people don't understand it.

What do the 2022 election results show about whether voters were confused by this new system?

Yeah, I like to start with a little bit of context in the fact that 2022 elections, because of the special election that we talked about earlier, were a bit confusing.

So our first ranked choice voting election, as you alluded to, was to fill the remainder of Don young seat.

And it was on the same piece of paper as our regularly scheduled prime, records going to primary.

So you had to pick one primary, one side and our first ranked choice voting, election on the other side.

And there were roughly 190,000 votes.

We saw 99.8% of those vote ballots being cast that were valid.

So a very, very low error rate, I think it was roughly 350 were actually over voted.

So we also saw a lot of people ranking.

So majority seven, 73% of people ranked in that race.

And I think that Alaskans really were able to use that ballot.

They were able to to vote that ballot, and they were able to show that they understood how to rank.

And the low error rate just proves that.

All right.

Thank you.

Learn about half of Alaskan voters are not registered with a political party.

Given that, how does a closed primary system serve non Democrats and non Republicans before 2022, they had to pick a primary ballot and couldn't select from a full pool of candidates.

Why was that a better system?

The allowance for political parties to associate.

And you know, there's a misconception by a lot of people that somehow political parties are so powerful and that their bosses that control it.

That's not true.

Certainly not true in Alaska by any stretch.

Political parties are basically associations generally of people who share some political philosophy.

But I can assure you that in the party I'm a member of these, that philosophy or those philosophies are all over the place.

There are people who may think like me on some issue and be totally opposite on another.

And so I, political parties just basically are an association.

The US Supreme Court says we, we have the right to associate as parties.

And so the rule, you know, essentially you ask the question, but I will say, why should somebody who is registered as a Democrat vote in the Republican primary to choose who their candidate is going to run against?

What do you think they're going to do then lowball somebody, you know, or, you know, pick somebody that will be a weaker candidate.

And so, the solution that the Republican Party and the Democrats actually initially did a very similar thing is just say, okay, it's going to be open to anybody except somebody who's registered in that party.

You, Julie, you referenced a statistic from the 2022 primary, saying that 51% crossed over in their primary balance.

Explain what that means.

And so that means.

So if you look at what we had prior to and I do want to point out that, you know, since 1947, we've we basically have had an open primary ballot most of our years.

So the party rule primary that's been in place has really only been in place since the year 2000.

And before then, any Alaskans could vote for any candidate they wanted to.

So I think it's a very Alaskan system.

But when we talk about cross party voting, what we're talking about is in, where you have a primary ballot, that's one party, whether it's, you know, initially we had six different ballots or and we had two, leading up to our 2022 election.

There's a person cannot vote for.

Obviously, if you have to pick a ballot, you cannot vote for somebody of the party that's on that ballot.

And in that case, it was just the Republicans had that, had a separate ballot.

But what we saw when we opened that primary back up is that voters could choose to vote for a Republican on one side and somebody else on another side, and when I talk about that cross party voting, that's what I'm talking about, is a voter had the ability to say, hey, I like the Republican in this race, but in this race I might like an independent or I might like an IP, I might like a Democrat.

And so that's what we saw is people taking advantage of that ability to vote for more than one party.

All right.

We only have a few seconds left.

How will you spend this last week in the lead up to the election?

Well, I, I voted.

So you've done your civic voter.

Two days ago, I called my brother, who was at a in a remote community in Alaska and just wanted to make sure he had a chance to vote.

And he confirmed this morning that he had.

But, I just reminded our children and, yeah, we're just basically doing the best we can with the limited funds that we have on the.

Yes and two campaign.

We're going up against the, humongous money machine.

I have to leave it there.

$12 million.

I'd like to talk about where the big money people, why are they playing in Alaska's politics?

We'll have to leave it there.

Julie.

A couple of seconds.

What's the last week look like for the last week?

We're going to be doing the same thing.

Getting everybody just telling everyone get out to vote is so important.

There are so many close races right now.

So important to get out to vote.

And we encourage voting.

No.

Want to thank you so much to our guests this evening.

That's it for this edition of Alaska Insight.

Visit our website Alaska public.org for breaking news and reports from our partner stations across the state.

While you're there, sign up for our free daily digest so you won't miss any of Alaska's top stories of the day.

Thanks for joining us this evening.

Remember to vote on November 5th.

I'm Lori Townsend.

Good night.

Thank you.