Alaska held its top-four primary on August 16. For U.S. House, Republican Tara Sweeney finished fourth with 3.71% of the vote, thus entitling her to appear on the November ballot. But on August 23, she withdrew. Because she withdrew as early as she did, the law says the fifth-place finisher can take her place on the November ballot. Chris Bye, a Libertarian, had finished fifth with .63% of the vote, so he can run in November. See this story.
The other three candidates are two Republicans (Sarah Palin and Nick Begich) and Democrat Mary Peltola. Thanks to J. R. Myers for this news.
Isn’t Sarah Palin spelled with an “h”?
ONE election Day and Condorcet = RCV done right
Really Richard, you can’t even spell Sarah Palin’s name correctly? No wonder this site is a joke.
Thank you, Craig. You are right; I just now fixed it.
Fortunate break for the Libertarian candidate. I hope he makes good use of the opportunity.
The votes are not all in the new 5th place can change by August 31st.
Richard, did you recently send a friend request and a message to me on Facebook? Or is there an imposter using your name and image?
https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100084487698594
It is a shame that JR Meyers did not make the top 4.
Just my thought. i think Trump/Palin 2024 would be interesting.
NONPARTISAN execs/judics via Appv — pending Condorcet.
NEW wiki-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
Missing – AppV [YES- NO default] tiebreaker
IE Both number and yes/no votes.
Nathan, I don’t use facebook.
A Libertarian in a contested RCV election? This could be interesting.
The comment at 7:38 pm was by Robert Stock.
Does he have any money?
No, he’s a night clerk at a motel 6 in Oklahoma.
@MS,
No chance. Bye has more than twice the votes as the 6th place candidate.
Five candidates registered with political groups qualified for general election legislature.
3 Libertarians, 1 Veterans, and 1 Constitution.
So why didn’t someone move up the ranks in the special election after Al Gross dropped out? They just had write-ins — and from what I understand like 5 or 6 of them.
Why do they have write-ins? The concept of write-ins in a top-four system seems kind of self-defeating.
I’m not digging Alaska’s system at all. Seems too goofy. It’s just turning into two Democrats vs two Republicans anyway, and with “exhausted” votes it’s just turning into plurality voting anyway.
This was a huge waste of time and probably money for the software to calculate the stuff, and worse it was driven entirely by Lisa Murkowski not wanting to be primaried out. That’s the only reason this was done.
I won’t ever support this scam in my state.
The Al Gross withdrawal came too late.
Folks can try and crisis write about election stuff in their own blog and be 100 pct accurate.
Folks can inform RW directly about any BAN story obvious typos and BAN news items.
@Cor,
When drafting the law, they had to start with existing law and make as few adjustments as possible.
Alaska statute with regard to write-in is different than in most states. It basically says that losers in primaries can run as a write-in in the general election (and oh by the way, anyone else can too). When Lisa Murkowski read the statute, she might have read it to say, “Lisa, you should run as a write-in, your father wanted you to be Senator. Run Lisa Run.” So that principle is still in place. The Division of Elections failed to fully implement the law. Each write-in candidate is a legitimate candidate, every bit as legitimate as the 4 advancers. A voter should be able to vote for each of them, and rank all of them.
Alaska had a system where a party nominee could withdraw and be replaced. When Bill Walker was running for governor, his Lieutenant Governor candidate withdrew, and was replaced by the Democratic nominee for governor. The Democrats chose not have a gubernatorial candidate.
So for Top 4 they had to write a new withdrawal procedure. Since there were no party nominees they could not let a party choose a replacement. So instead they just said let the 5th place candidate move up.
But they didn’t fully account for the timing difference between a special and general election. There was not enough time for Gross to withdraw and be replaced. There was enough time to remove Gross’s name. Clearly it was not a technical limitation, but rather an arbitrary deadline.
California had a similar provision in its Top 2 procedure where a 3rd place candidate would move up. It was removed. California continues to have a moveup provision for its nonpartisan Top 2 elections.
I agree with bdlu