Peltola defends ranked choice voting after defeating Palin in Alaska

Mary Peltola (D), who won the special election for Alaska’s lone House seat on Tuesday, is defending the state’s newly implemented ranked choice voting system amid GOP criticism.

“Ranked choice voting is still new to a lot of people. And change is hard, and it doesn’t come easy. But I think that, in this regard, change is certainly good and worth the growing pains,” Peltola said in a phone interview with The Hill on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after her upset victory in The Last Frontier. “I do think — I have a lot of faith in ranked choice voting. Eighty-five percent of the time, the person with the most votes is the person who ends up with the seat.”

Peltola, who will become the first Alaskan Native and first Democrat in decades to represent her state in the House, will fill the remainder of the late Rep. Don Young’s (R-Alaska) term. 

She defied expectations after defeating two Republicans — former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) and Nick Begich III, the former co-chair for Young’s 2020 reelection campaign — in a seat that many presumed would be won by a Republican.

But the state’s use of a new combination of an open primary system and ranked-choice voting in the general election saw Peltola prevail. The ranked choice voting requires Alaskans to rank the primary’s four top vote-getters by preference, with the candidate who receives more than half the votes outright winning the race. 

If no candidate wins following the initial tabulation of votes, the lowest vote-getter of the four is knocked out and voters who chose the eliminated candidate have their next choice of candidate applied. The process continues until one candidate receives more than half of the vote. 

“You know, clearly there has been a lot of messaging in the last couple years about — kind of attacking the confidence that we have in our electoral process and our electoral system,” Peltola said. “And Alaska has a very, very solid and … great elections. We have a lot of faith in our elections. And I think it’s a disservice to, you know, shoot holes in the confidence that we have in our election.”

Following Peltola’s victory, some Republicans criticized the new system. Palin issued a statement saying “[ranked]-choice voting was sold as the way to make elections better reflect the will of the people. As Alaska – and America – now sees, the exact opposite is true.”

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) fumed over Twitter that “ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections.”

Peltola will face off against Palin and Begich again in November, as the three are running in a separate race to fill the same seat for a full term starting in January 2023.