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Republican Sarah Palin lost the special election held for the seat of the late Rep. Don Young (R-AK).
The reason she lost was not that there was not enough support among conservatives.
She lost because there were two conservatives and only one liberal in the race when the votes were cast.
Ranked Choice Flaws
The goal behind ranked choice voting is to make sure every vote counts.
The problem, however, is pretty evident when one party strategically drops a candidate, leaving the other party to fight it out.
This ensures the split of the vote among the second party while the first party benefits from the remaining candidate and the candidate that dropped.
Mary Peltola defeated Palin and fellow Republican Nick Begich for those unfamiliar with this particular race.
This happened because the other Democrat in the race dropped out, leading to all tickets that cast a vote for him going to their second choice candidate.
Peltola benefitted from this, handing her the win.
The identical ticket will be in place for the general election that is coming up in November.
If Peltola gets over the 50 percent threshold on the first ballot, she will have the race.
Realistically, with two Republicans on the ticket, neither will reach the 50 percent threshold and need the vote to go to round two, where the third-place candidate would be dropped and the second choice on those ballots would be moved to the two remaining.
If the election results hold true to the special election, Palin would remain in the race, surely receiving the lion’s share of Begich’s vote.
Even though Begich finished in third, he is calling for Palin to drop out, clearly not willing to leave the race, which will more than likely hand that seat over to Peltola for the full term.
Palin stated, “We had ranked-choice voting.
“This will be going into our fourth vote to find the person to have Alaska’s at-large seat in Congress to replace Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, who passed away some months ago, nearly eight months ago, meaning Alaska will have gone without representation for about eight months.”
On Begich refusing to drop out, Palin added, “I’ve thumped him three times now in our first three votes, and yet still he knows that this just creates disunity, a lot of division.
“The conservative, the Republican vote will be split again.
“The math shows exactly what’s going to happen in that final vote in the general election in November. He knows what’s going to happen.
“And of course, he’s calling on me to drop out of the race.
“And I say, why should I? We thumped you three times. He needs to drop out, or he at least needs to call for unity behind my candidacy.”
That is unlikely to happen, however, because Palin is a MAGA candidate and Begich is not.
So, instead of helping a fellow Republican take a seat, he will remain in the race and hand Democrats an unexpected win.
