River News: Our View

We’re not sure just who cooked up the notion of so-called final five and ranked choice voting in Wisconsin — other than George Soros — but whoever it was won’t be winning any awards for smarts, at least on the Republican side.

That’s because it’s the end of the Republican Party as we know it if it is enacted — a final formal nod to the hegemony of uniparty globalist and billionaire power if it becomes widespread in this country. After all, any voting that sounds like it’s named after a basketball tournament is bound to be little more than theatre.

And theatre is what it is. As we recount in our story today, this is how the scheme — and scheme in the negative sense is how we mean it — works: Everybody runs in a free-for-all nonpartisan primary. The top five winners then advance to the general election, where voters rank each candidate sequentially, according to their preference, one through five.

Then the computers get to work in an instant runoff. First the person with the least first-place votes is eliminated and those who supported that candidate as a first choice have their second choices distributed to the others accordingly. The machines do this over and over until there are only two, and then the one with the most first-place and reallocated preferences wins.

Voila! What you have, all without any muss or fuss, is a lone candidate who has won a majority of the votes, or so they say.

Follow that? Don’t feel bad if you don’t. Not too many do.

At first blush, this all sounds pretty smart. And why not? Hey, it was cooked up by experts!

Turns out, though, as is usually the case for schemes cooked up by experts, there are some large holes in the plan, that is, if you’re rooting for a system that actually produces responsive elected officials.

Let’s take a look.

For starters, the system does not produce winners with a “majority” of votes, unless you spell majority “t-r-o-j-a-n-h-o-r-s-e.”

For one thing, the process itself inevitably disenfranchises tons of voters. As you labor through your ballot, you had better make sure you select all five preferences (or whatever the number is up through five) because if you don’t your ballot will become “exhausted” down the line. That’s another way of saying tossed out.

For instance, what if our choices include Joe Biden and others we disdain? What if we detest every candidate except the one we want to vote for? Would we mark the rest as two-through-five, as we are supposed to do, or refuse to vote for the rest at all, as would make sense?

Of course, if we choose to not vote for all the candidates, our ballots will be invalidated, or “exhausted” as they say, in later rounds and we wouldn’t have a voice. Vociferous support for only one candidate is a ticket to disenfranchisement under ranked-choice voting.

With hundreds or thousands of ballots potentially being tossed in any given election, it’s hard to argue that the final tally represents a majority.

But what if we do hold our nose and rank all five? What if everybody does? Does that mean the winner has a “majority”? 

Of course not. That happens only in a world where a person’s second or third or fourth choices are seen as equal to a person’s first-place choice, given that in later rounds second choices and third choices and so on will be distributed to other candidates and counted as if they were first-place choices.

That’s problematic because, in the ranked choice system, some voters will simply rank many candidates except their favorite choice randomly, either because they know little or nothing about the other candidates or they just don’t give a rat’s hat about any candidate except the one they came to vote for.

The winner’s “majority” will thus often be a house of cards built not only by the labor of true support but by the flimsy infrastructure of preferences plucked out of thin air. 

Many winners will not even have received the most first-place votes. 

The MacIver Institute has a great analysis of ranked-choice voting on its website, and they cite this example: In Australia, where ranked-choice voting is used, “a candidate for senate from the then-newly formed Motoring Enthusiasts Party (platform: tougher vehicle impoundment laws) won election in 2013 after getting a record-low half-percent (0.51%) of first preference votes.”

Then too, the reality is that under ranked choice voting, the system will be dominated by mediocre candidates with weak support who go out of their way not to alienate anyone, lest they be cast down ballot. Being milquetoast is the best way to ensure victory in the ranked-choice system, and that’s exactly the way the establishment wants it. 

Indeed, in the public hearing held recently here in Wisconsin, proponents of the system repeatedly crowed about how it would eliminate “extremist” candidates and produce “moderate” winners.

Here’s one of the bill’s lead sponsors, Sen. Jesse James (R-Altoona), speaking about the system’s advantages: “This leads to increased cooperation and bipartisanship. Since candidates will need to secure a clear majority of votes to win, they will need a message and a voting record that is able to get them a majority of the votes.”

Remember, that’s a majority of votes as defined by the bill’s authors, a concoction of votes that could include a winner who collected more reallocated down-ballot preferences than first-place votes. And it’s worth noting that the current traditional system can better ensure “majorities” by simply implementing voter runoff elections. Remember the Georgia U.S. Senate contests?

Or here’s Democrat Jeff Smith of Brunswick, speaking about the evils of extreme partisanship: “Traditional partisan primaries leave voters with a stark contrast between political parties instead of a vast middle ground that can be owned by candidates that have a chance to win in a general election using final five voting.”

Don’t you love that word “owned”? It’s very telling. The central problem is — and this becomes clear reading statements like the above — the proponents of RCV are doing exactly what they say the current system does: rigging elections toward candidates with certain ideological perspectives. By their own admission, they are rooting out “extreme” and “partisan” candidates in favor of the moderate middle ground.

This is objectionable on obvious grounds.

First, why adopt a system that — though they say it cleverly — admittedly rigs the system? The ideological content of candidates shouldn’t matter, whether it is polarized or bipartisan; what should matter is who the people want, period. 

Ranked-choice voting does not ensure that. It doesn’t give you a candidate; it gives you a cardboard cutout drawn up by algorithms and political calculations designed to give you a higher ranking, if not a first-place vote.

Second, just who are these extremist, partisan candidates that we want to lock out of the system but who are winning elections these days in the old-fashioned one-person, one-vote way? And who are these “bipartisan” moderates the country so desperately needs?

Well, according to Democrats, extremists are people who believe in the constitution. Believe in free speech? You’re a racist and your candidates do not deserve to win. Believe in the Second Amendment? You’re a racist and a domestic terrorist and your candidate does not deserve to win. Oppose vaccine mandates that compel you to inject experimental drugs into your body? You’re a racist and a threat to public health in general and your candidates do not deserve to win.

So we’ll design a system to get rid of those candidates. We’ll design a system that ensures “bipartisanship,” otherwise known as the uniparty. And that is what ranked-choice voting is all about. 

It’s about resurrecting the “moderate middle,” you know, the same moderate middle that governed for generations after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that has nearly brought the country to its knees — a political middle of uniparty Republicans and Democrats, of George and Jeb Bushes and Bill and Hillary Clintons who teamed up to swindle America of its manufacturing jobs, to indoctrinate the nation’s children into wokeness socialism, to open our southern border to migrant invasion, to fight never-ending wars, and to monstrously expand the administrative state.

Those cancerous policies are what those nasty “extreme” candidates are fighting, and that’s who the people supporting ranked-choice voting are trying to get rid of.

But it is they who are the extremists.

Once upon a time, the left bragged that if they could only get more people to vote — particularly the working class — they would sweep to power. Socialism for the elite would prevail in all its glory. 

Then a funny thing happened. The working class awoke and became, first, Reaganites, and, later, MAGA. So now the left does not trust the people. Actually they never did, they just thought they could dupe the stupid working class into voting for them.

When they realized they could not, they resorted to fake crises and to manipulating election laws to “win,” but of course rigging elections is not fool-proof. So they have had to take the next step, and that step is to torpedo the strong-willed candidates who will stand up for the constitution and the people, aka, the extremists.

Part of that strategy is to use the courts and ideological bureaucrats to bounce candidates from the ballot altogether, most notably Donald Trump. And ranked-choice voting is another way, a system designed to produce the weakest candidates most open to surrender to the uniparty.

So voter beware. With ranked choice voting, we will end up with the rankest of choices, and the results will be more of the globalist same.