Alaska’s current primary system is causing political chaos.

Mail-in and early voting for the August 20 primary have already begun, but ultimately nearly every candidate running for state office will make it onto the general ballot, no matter how few votes they receive in the primary.

Due to a narrowly passed 2020 ballot proposal, voters currently have to resort to ranked-choice voting and a “nonpartisan” primary in which the four candidates with the most votes in each race automatically advance to the general election in November.

Since there are only four or fewer candidates in most states, the primaries are largely pointless. Only in the race for the US Congress is the field of candidates significantly thinned out by the primaries. In this race, 12 candidates have applied. The four best placed in the primaries go into the main election.

But in almost all other races for state House or Senate seats, the primaries are little more than a popularity contest, with no real consequences in terms of eliminating unpopular candidates. In fact, in all but two of the 50 races, every candidate for the Alaska Legislature will make it to the primary.

In practice, this means that the general election will feature many races in which candidates from the same party compete against a field of three or four candidates, resulting in vote splitting and the possibility of a winner being a candidate who is not favored by the majority of voters.

Under Alaska’s traditional primary system, fringe candidates would have been eliminated in the general election. Now, however, voters must evaluate up to four candidates in the general election. If no candidate wins an outright majority in the first round, the least popular candidate is eliminated and his or her second votes are allocated to the remaining candidates to see if any of them can cobble together a majority in the second round of counting. This continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes, although many of those are second votes from eliminated candidates.

This puts political parties in a contradictory and often confusing situation: they must spend time urging voters to choose the preferred candidate as their first choice, while simultaneously asking them to rank the same candidate as their second choice if they prefer an alternative candidate as their first choice.

To avoid this confusion, a number of Republican Party constituencies across Alaska have issued resolutions calling on Republican candidates for a seat in the U.S. Congress to voluntarily drop out of the general election if they did not receive the most votes in the primary.

At first glance, this seems like a reasonable idea. If congressional candidates with little support simply drop out in the primaries, the party could mobilize a single candidate in the general election for U.S. Congress. That means less money needs to be spent promoting multiple candidates and less time needs to be spent teaching voters how to rank the candidates to ensure that at least one GOP candidate is successful in the general election.

The problem is that many voters skip the primaries because they see no point in casting their ballot when almost all candidates – except for those running for US Congress – are moving forward anyway. This raises the question of how reliable the primaries are in determining which US congressional candidate will be most popular in the main election.

In addition, Democratic voters can vote for Republican candidates during the primaries – and vice versa. This could distort public perceptions of how much actual party support a particular U.S. congressional candidate actually has. It may be that a number of Democrats vote for a left-leaning RINO in the primaries just to make it look like that candidate has the majority of Republican support in the primary election. In the primary election, however, these Democratic voters will certainly support the Democratic candidate and rank a RINO Republican as their second choice.

Whichever way you look at it, jungle primaries and ranked choice voting are a convoluted matrix that can easily be manipulated by policymakers to produce results that do not reflect the will of the voters.

Fortunately, Alaskans have a unique opportunity to eliminate jungle primaries and the RCV system by voting yes on Ballot Proposition 2. If passed in November, Alaska will restore party primaries and the traditional voting system for all future elections.

HOW TO VOTE IN THE ALASKA PRIMARY ELECTION

— Click here for information on how and where to vote in the primary election before August 20.

— Click here for information on voting on Primary Day (August 20).

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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