Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), who is running to represent Alaska’s At-Large Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, said in an interview on Breitbart News editor Adrienne Ross’s eponymous podcast published Tuesday that “ranked choice voting” is an electoral reform mechanism designed to “elect Democrats and destroy our country.”
“Ranked choice voting” — approved by referendum in Alaska in 2020 and first applied in 2022 — removes the standard voting protocol of an individual voter selecting one candidate on a ballot. Instead, voters using ranked choice voting assign a numerical rank to multiple candidates rather than voting for one preferred candidate.
“This is what’s going to elect Democrats and destroy our country before we even know it,” Palin said of the “ranked choice voting” system, warning of its future national impact if allowed to proliferate to other states. “I am just sounding that alarm that it’s this bad,” she warned.
Relevant portion begins at 9:34:
Palin said Alaska has become a de facto pilot project for the “ranked choice voting” system and other Democrat-driven changes to election laws marketed by the left as enhancements to voter “accessibility.”
“I don’t want this to happen to any other electorate, in any city, in any state,” she stated. “Alaska is kind of this test case right now where we have elements of a perfect bad storm. We have lax voter-ID laws. We have a long election cycle where mail-in ballots can be mailed in for — gosh — it seems like months, if not many weeks.”
She continued, “Those are just a couple of aspects that create kind of this distrust of people in the process, and we cannot afford to have people not trust free and fair elections in our communities, in our states, in our nation, or we’re going to go under.”
“It’s not winner-take-all,” Palin explained of Alaska’s new election system. “You rank the candidates. … Then a process of elimination via an algorithm in a computer takes votes and distributes it to other candidates if the person that you did choose as your number-one pick didn’t end up on top.”
The former Alaska governor emphasized the convoluted “ranked choice voting” is compared to standard elections.
“The ballot question that asked whether we wanted ranked choice voting, it was 26 pages long, the explanation,” she recalled. “That right there should have told people, ‘Hey, wait.’ Anything that you can’t explain concisely, it’s no good when it comes to government.”
Ross commented that the system “split[s] the vote,” and referencing a comment by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, she said that “the goal, really, is that no true conservative will ever hold office again.” Palin agreed.
A Project Veritas investigation found staffers of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) describing the campaign for ranked choice voting as a measure to assist the incumbent senator’s reelection campaign.
Palin concluded, “This was written for Lisa Murkowski — and she’s a RINO — to keep her in the U.S. Senate because she can’t run and win as a normal Republican in Alaska because people figured her out. It was her attorney who wrote this thing.”
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.