An Anchorage judge has upheld Ballot Measure 2 after a lawsuit from Attorney Kenneth Jacobus, Scott Kohlhaas and Bob Bird, Chairman of the Alaskan Independence Party sued to prevent it from going into effect, citing its unconstitutionality. They wanted the return to the political party-based system.
Attorney Jacobus appeared on KSRM’s “The Bird’s Eye View” saying he’s not surprised by the outcome:
“We needed to talk about the gubernatorial election. We needed to talk about ranked choice voting. We needed to talk about the four-winner jungle primary and we argued that all three of them were unconstitutional in their face and the superior court rejected all three arguments. We did not argue that there was anything wrong with additional disclosure of dark money, which I think everybody is in favor of that. We have to decide now whether we are going to appeal and I have recommended that we appeal even though we don’t know what the supreme court is going to do. We just have to get all these issues out in the open so that the state of Alaska, even if its forced to run an election in 2022 under the new rules, that any problems that we call their attention to, they’ll be able to address in advance.”
The Associated Press reports that Superior Court Judge Gregory Miller, in a Thursday ruling, said that Alaska “has the legal right to continue using the old system or adopt a new system; that the voters in November 2020 chose one system over the other does not make the new law facially unconstitutional.”
Bird spoke with KSRM on his thoughts on the outcome of the suit:
“We have a corrupt judiciary and a judiciary that had a direct hand in creating the successful proposition 2, which was negating the legislative requirement that witness signatures were necessary on absentee ballots.”
With ranked-choice voting, all candidates running for a specific office run in the primary together, and the top four vote-getters advance to the general election. Then, voters rank the candidates by their political preference. Jacobus and Bird state that the alternative political parties will not be represented in the general election if there are two strong Democrats and two strong Republicans in the primary.