Alaska Senate Race Remains Unresolved as Ranked-Choice Count Continues

Alaska has finished voting for the United States Senate and still cannot say who won. That is not a blizzard. It is the system, operating exactly as designed.

Ranked-choice voting was sold to Alaskans as majority rule with better manners. What it has delivered, again, is a waiting room. Democrat Mary Peltola says the outcome will not be known in hours or days. Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan is telling his own supporters the count may take weeks. When both campaigns are briefing the public on the calendar rather than the verdict, the reform is not proving its sophistication. It is failing the basic test of an election: can a citizen find out who won?

The theory is not contemptible. A plurality winner can be a weak one. Two candidates on the same side can split a majority and hand the office to the other party. So let voters rank their choices, drop the last-place finisher, move the votes, and repeat until someone clears 50 percent. In a white paper, this is elegance. In Alaska, we have the field test.

Voters adopted the machinery narrowly in 2020 — a top-four primary bolted to a ranked-choice general — after a campaign wrapped in nonpartisan language and financed in no small part by the Lower 48 democracy industry. The design did what a party primary exists to prevent. It kept multiple Republicans on the November ballot to damage one another while Democrats consolidated. In 2022, that helped elect a Democrat to the House even though Republican candidates together held more first-choice support, because a large share of one Republican's voters would not rank the other. Those ballots were exhausted. They disappeared from the math. The winner was then presented as the majority's choice.

Look hard at that word. The majority ranked-choice celebrates is frequently a majority of the ballots that survived, not a majority of the people who voted. A citizen who ranked only the candidate he actually wanted has done nothing wrong. The system thanks him by throwing his ballot out and shrinking the denominator until the numbers behave. That is not a technicality. It is the entire moral advertisement, and it is false.

The delay is part of the same trick. Alaska is vast, and mail ballots take time under any rules. Distance does not require the state to withhold a result until a central office can run elimination rounds that are forbidden to start until the last valid ballot arrives. An ordinary count can be published as it comes in, in public, precinct by precinct. Ranked-choice holds back the only figure that counts until the redistribution is complete, then asks voters to trust a sequence most of them cannot replay at the kitchen table. After the last decade, trust is not a courtesy reformers get to invoice.

Republicans who like this arrangement should stop pretending it is a neutral upgrade. A faction of the party prefers it because it cushions incumbents from their own voters. Lisa Murkowski's 2022 survival — past the Republican voters who preferred her challenger, and with a material assist from Democratic rankings — was not an accident of civics. It was the feature. If you believe primary voters choose badly, say so, and persuade them. Do not team up with outside good-government outfits to demote their first vote into a suggestion.

A Senate election is not a puzzle and not a therapy session for coalition politics. Count the votes in the open. Name the winner. If the law makes that impossible, the law is the problem, and Alaskans should repeal it.