The liberal ideas that start in NY City don’t stop here—even when they should.The latest proof is so-called “ranked-choice voting.”
NY City forced this undemocratic system on its residents in 2021, with painful consequences. Yet rather than learn from NYC and the handful of states with similar problems, liberal activists are demanding that every state implement this foolish idea. At least 14 states are already considering it, and more city and state officials pushed proposals just this week. They should first look at how ranked-choice voting has failed in the Big Apple and everywhere else. Any New Yorker who voted in the city’s 2021 mayoral primary had to endure the reality of ranked-choice voting.Before then, voting was simple:Just choose the candidate you want. If that person gets the most votes, he or she wins. If they don’t get the most votes you lose.
That traditional, common sense system has been replaced by a bastardized ranked-voting nightmare. New Yorkers are forced to rank candidates from the one you like the most to the one least favored(Which is what a voter does anyway before voting) Now if you don’t rank them all watch out-your vote might not be counted. It’s yet another way the most restrictive state in America makes life more difficult for its citizens.
It gets worse. In ranked-choice voting, the candidate who gets the most votes doesn’t automatically win. That’s because if no candidate gets more than 50% of the votes, officials start kicking out candidates from the race and redistribute their second-place votes, then their third place votes and so on. In short, these officials have made a mountain out of a molehill. This complicated process repeats until someone eventually gets a majority of all the votes that remain, even if that means ignoring all your top candidates and choosing, say, your fifth pick.
Which is exactly what happened in NYC in 2021. Eric Adams got the most first-choice votes of any candidates but it took EIGHT rounds of kicking out other candidates before he was finally announced the winner. Shockingly, it took nearly a month to certify the results because officials messed up the count by including the wrong ballots. Can you blame them? They were trying to make sense of a nonsensical system.All told more than 140,000 ballots-15% of the vote-were cast out. Why? No one knows for certain but the City stifled their voices—undemocratic and un-American.NY City is far from alone. Recently, San Francisco Bay Area admitted it announced the wrong winner in a race with ranked-choice voting. It’s now recounting the votes in all the other precincts throughout the city. With normal voting, this does not happen; with ranked-voting it’s commonplace.
Then there’s vote trashing. In a 2018 congressional race in Maine, more than 8,000 votes were thrown away. In Alaska’s August 2022 special election for its at-large congressional seat, 11,000 votes were were effectively discarded and nearly 15,000 were thrown out in the November general election.
Finally, under ranked-choice voting, the most popular candidates lose all the time. In the first round of the Maine race, Republican Bruce Poliquin got 46.3% of the vote, only to lose to Democrat Jared Golden, who got 45.6%.
And in a 2021 10-person race for four open seats on a Maine city commission race, one of the eventual winners began with just 4% of the vote!!
Liberals claim that this voting scheme is necessary to weed out” extreme candidates “ and will restore peoples “faith in democracy.” The real reason is that Liberals believe this system will tilt the country to the left This has already happened in Alaska and Maine, which now have Democrats in Congress despite Republicans getting more votes in those races.
In fact, ranked-choice voting undermines faith in democracy. It disenfranchises voters by throwing out their ballots, shredding the basic American principle of” One person, one vote.” It creates situations in which candidates with the most votes lose, creating a feeling that voting is rigged. It leads to delays in election outcomes, giving rise to fears of fraud, corruption and sheer bureaucratic incompetence.
More than a dozen states are debating the change to ranked-voting schemes, with surely more to come. No state should abide the lies of the liberal left. What’s wrong with a tried and true voting system that actually works?