Have you ever noticed that every time Democrat lose, they come up with a new way to change the laws so they can manipulate the system to make sure they never get beat again?
Mass mailing of unidentifiable absentee ballots, no ID drop boxes, no voter ID at all, and “jungle” primaries are just a few of the “innovations” Democrats have passed over the last 20-years or so to ensure they achieve a lock on elections in the state where the “innovation” is tried.
And Washington, Oregon, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, Alaska, and Pennsylvania have moved from swing state or even tilting slightly toward Republicans to becoming more and more reliably Democrat.
The latest state to be in their crosshairs is Virginia, where, in 2021, Democrats were stunned to lose control of the Virginia House of Delegates and to be defeated in the statewide elections for Governor, Lt. Governor and Attorney General by conservative Republicans – and, in 2022, to see Democrat Congresswoman Elaine Luria, a member of the J6 Committee, defeated by conservative Republican Jan Kiggans.
The Democratic Party’s response to these defeats was not to reexamine their policies to address the concerns of Virginia’s hard pressed working families, small businesses or to stop attacking religious liberty and the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment – it was to try to change the way Virginians vote to make sure Democrat candidates wouldn’t be defeated next time around.
And their proposed method is “Ranked Choice Voting,” or RCV, which was just approved in a progressive-sponsored ballot initiative in Nevada and is next on the agenda in a bill moving through the Virginia legislature that would expand Ranked Choice Voting to include any local or constitutional office.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said it best in a tweet, “Ranked-choice voting is a scam to rig elections.”
As our friends at the Naples, Florida, Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) explained, funded by the progressive Left, RCV advocacy organizations claim that this massive overhaul can improve voter confidence by providing more candidate choices, decreasing negative campaigning, and ensuring majority rule. But these are false promises, and the proliferation of RCV would be harmful to American elections.
Since our founding, American elections have been decided on the “one-person, one vote” principle, in which each voter chooses one candidate, and the winner secures the plurality of votes. By contrast, voters in RCV elections must rank candidates on the ballot. If no candidate wins a 50-percent majority, the race goes through multiple rounds of tabulation in an instant runoff.
In other words, a computer picks the winner if no candidate gets at least 50-percent + 1.
One of the biggest hurdles for voters in RCV elections is the difficulty of being informed about the candidates. Having a strong knowledge of all candidates on the ballot is a necessary component of active citizenship, but RCV creates the opportunity for several candidates without party affiliations to run in one race. This may seem manageable when there are four prominent candidates in a race for a high-profile position, but when there are upwards of 20 candidates running for an obscure local office, knowing all relevant details about the candidates’ positions and backgrounds becomes much more difficult.
In traditional elections, every submitted ballot that follows the instructions is counted towards the result, but this isn’t the case with RCV.
“Exhausted ballots” in RCV elections do not count towards the final tally. While many RCV ballots are thrown out due to voter error in following convoluted instructions, ballots that follow the instructions to the letter can also be thrown away because the voter ranked candidates who are no longer in contention.10 As candidates are eliminated through multiple rounds of tabulation, voters have their ballots exhausted if they only ranked candidates that have been removed during successive rounds.
In other words, for a voter’s voice to fully count in every round of an RCV election, he must vote for all candidates on the ballot, even those he may not support.
Because of ballot exhaustion, winners of RCV races do not necessarily represent the choice of all voters who participated. RCV claims to protect majority rule, but in reality, RCV creates an artificial majority by eliminating the votes of the lowest-scoring candidates during successive tabulations. One study of Maine elections found that, of 98 recent RCV elections, 60 percent of RCV victors did not win by a majority of the total votes cast.
And there’s another reason conservatives should oppose Ranked Choice Voting: It dilutes the contrast between the candidates. Conservatives win when they can draw a distinct contrast between themselves and the conservative worldview and their Far Left Progressive opponent. In Ranked Choice Voting all candidates and their positions are reduced to shades of grey, in which the candidate who comes across as “least worst” is likely to prevail.
We urge Virginians to contact their Delegate and State Senator – tell them to say NO to Ranked Choice Voting. Go here to contact your Virginia state legislator, tell him or her to vote NO if Ranked Choice Voting comes before the legislature for a vote.
2022 Elections
Control of Congress
ranked voting
mail-in balloting
voter fraud
elections integrity
Alaska senate race
Lisa Murkowski
Voter ID
Jungle primaries
Virginia ranked choice voting
exhausted ballots