LETTER: Ranked-choice voting isn’t for Nevada
The ranked-choice voting initiative that’s on the November ballot in Nevada will produce results that are the opposite of what the majority of voters want. That’s what happened in Alaska, which held its first ranked-choice election in August.
Alaska is a solid Republican state. In the open primary, the top four vote-getters were three Republicans and one Democrat. In the general election, those three split the Republican vote, handing the win to the Democrat.
If we get ranked-choice voting, political operatives will game the system by supporting multiple candidates from the opposing party, while influencing their own party to field just one candidate. Ranked-choice voting is also more susceptible to manipulation or error in the counting and tabulating phase, which is much more complex than the current system and can be done only by machine, making it more opaque and less transparent than the current system. It’s also more costly and time-consuming and delays election results.
There’s a reason we have separate primary elections for the parties. It’s to hone down the field so we don’t have a vote-splitting train wreck in the general election that produces a result the majority of voters don’t want. Ranked-choice voting will make things worse.