Legislation has been introduced in the Utah State Legislature to end ranked-choice voting (RCV) for municipal elections. It is imperative that legislators enact this bill and ensure full election integrity.
House Bill 290 (HB 290) is sponsored by Katy Hall (R). If enacted, it would repeal the Municipal Alternate Voting Methods Pilot Project, which promotes RCV for municipalities and is a major step toward RCV in Utah.
RCV threatens election integrity and undermines the electorate’s ability to choose the best candidate in elections. The May 10, 2021 issue of The New American magazine explains how ranked-choice voting works and why it would harm U.S. elections:
[It] is a complicated system that requires voters to assign a rank to each candidate on the ballot, regardless of whether they support that candidate. If no candidate is ranked first by a majority of voters, the lowest-performing candidate is eliminated. Voters who gave their highest ranking to the eliminated candidate then have their second choice counted instead. This process repeats until one candidate receives a majority.
As implied above, ranked-choice voting can lead to candidates with little genuine support winning elections. The system confuses voters, distracts from policy issues, and forces voters to vote for candidates they otherwise would not support. In the United States, ranked-choice voting was enacted in Maine in 2016 and Alaska in 2020. These efforts, primarily backed by liberals, led to Republican U.S. Representative from Maine Bruce Poliquin losing to Democrat Jared Golden in 2018 despite winning a plurality in the first round. Meanwhile, some political analysts believe that Alaska’s new system, which also eliminates party primaries, will enable liberal Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski’s reelection in 2022 despite her unpopularity among Republicans.
Sure enough, RCV allowed U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski to win re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2022 against conservative Republican Kelly Tshibaka, despite Murkowski’s inability to win a Republican primary under a traditional election system.
With any voting system, the more complicated it is, the greater the risk of manipulation strategies or fraud. Additionally, RCV would make hand counts much more difficult, creating an excuse for computerized vote counting. By contrast, genuine election integrity must involve hand-counted paper ballots.
Contact your state representative and senator and urge them to repeal ranked-choice voting with HB 290 and to further strengthen election integrity in Utah.
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