Alaska's Ranked-Choice Voting System Is a Rigged, Corrupt Scheme Benefiting Democrats and Murkowski
Source: John Daniel Davidson. "The Senate Race In Alaska Is What A Rigged Election Looks Like." August 24, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author argues that Alaska's ranked-choice voting system is essentially rigged to help Democrats and protect Senator Murkowski, pointing to a bizarre scheme where a fake candidate with a nearly identical name to the Republican incumbent was recruited to confuse voters and split the vote. He says this system was created by Murkowski's own staff to avoid primary challenges and has been kept in place through heavy outside spending, and it should be abolished.
Conclusion
Alaska's ranked-choice voting (RCV) system constitutes a rigged election process that should be abolished, as it was designed to and does systematically favor Democrats and protect Sen. Lisa Murkowski at the expense of conservative Republicans.
Premises
- RCV allows multiple candidates from the same party to advance to the general election, splitting the Republican vote and enabling Democrats to win with a plurality (as happened with Peltola in 2022).
- In the current Senate race, a fraudulent 'decoy' candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan—recruited and assisted by Democrat operatives—registered under a nearly identical name to Sen. Dan Sullivan specifically to confuse voters and siphon votes from him.
- RCV was originally created by Sen. Murkowski's own staffers (Scott Kendall and her former Chief of Staff) explicitly to prevent her from facing a Republican primary challenge she could lose.
- The campaigns to pass RCV in 2020 and defeat its repeal in 2024 were funded overwhelmingly by outside/out-of-state money (12-to-1 and 100-to-1 spending advantages respectively), suggesting the system is propped up by moneyed interests rather than genuine voter preference.
- RCV has produced other absurd outcomes, such as allowing a convicted felon serving a 20-year prison sentence to appear on the 2024 ballot.
- The cumulative effect of these design features and manipulations is to entrench Democrat and establishment Republican (Murkowski) power against the wishes of conservative Alaska voters.
Assumptions
- That the primary or sole intent behind RCV's creation was political entrenchment rather than legitimate electoral reform goals (e.g., reducing polarization, eliminating spoiler effects).
- That a system's outcomes disproportionately disadvantaging one party's preferred candidates constitutes evidence of that system being 'rigged' rather than simply structurally different from plurality voting.
- That the 'decoy' candidate scheme is illegal or should be illegal, and that current election law inadequately prevents such tactics.
- That outside funding in ballot initiative campaigns is inherently illegitimate or corrupting, regardless of which side benefits.
- That conservative Republican candidates represent the 'true' will of Alaska voters being thwarted by the system.
- That RCV's tendency to sometimes elect candidates from the plurality-losing party in a splintered field is a bug rather than a feature reflecting genuine voter preference aggregation.