Nick Begich blames Sarah Palin for the loss of the Alaska special House election — fairly enough — but he advances a strange argument: that Palin convinced her supporters not to rank other candidates. As a simple matter of math, this makes no sense: Palin got more first-place votes than Begich, which meant that Begich was eliminated and Palin was not. As a result, even if every single Palin voter had ranked Begich second, it wouldn’t have mattered. As I noted yesterday, Palin’s larger problem (aside from her personal unpopularity) was the jungle primary system that left two Republicans facing one Democrat; problems with ranked-choice voting (i.e., the 11,000 Begich voters who listed no second choice) were just the icing on the cake.
All of that said, there is one thing missing from this argument: At least thus far, nobody knows whom Palin’s voters or Mary Peltola’s voters ranked second. Thus far, at least, the Alaska secretary of state has only released the first-place votes and the reallocated Begich votes. In New York City, the formal reports still do not offer transparency into whom those who voted for Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia picked below the top slot, although groups studying the election have been able to get access to more detailed data about how many ballots made only one choice.
Again: This is no way to run an election. If the ranking of candidates is to be a major feature of elections, the least that election officials can do is report, in a timely and transparent fashion as part of their regular disclosures to the public, how the supporters of each first-choice candidate ranked the others. Those are, within a ranked-choice system, legal votes. They should not be hard to find.