What is ranked choice voting, the new election process used in Alaska?

Instead of voting for a single candidate, voters in Alaska Tuesday are ranking their favorite candidates on their ballots in an election process called ranked choice voting that is becoming more popular in the U.S.

Fox News Digital spoke with American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Kevin Kosar, who studies politics, Congress and election reform, to better understand the process, how it has been implemented in America, and its impact on this year’s midterm election primaries.

What is ranked choice voting?

“Ranked choice voting differs from the voting that most Americans are used to experiencing, where you walk into a voting booth or pick up your mail-in ballot and you pick one candidate for one position among a variety of individuals,” Kosar told Fox News Digital in an interview.

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“With ranked choice voting, you get to rank the candidates presented before you. So the candidate you like the most, you rank number one, the candidate you like the least you put in the last place, and then everybody else falls in between. And that’s ranked choice voting from the voters experience,” Kosar said.

Ranked choice vote counting operates normally on the first round, where only voters’ first choice is counted. But if no candidate reaches 50% of the vote, then election officials will begin counting the second choice candidates. 

The process involves eliminating the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes. From those ballots, election officials tally the second-choice candidate, adding to the total tally of the other candidates. 

“And they keep doing that until somebody hits that 50% threshold,” Kosar said.

How will ranked choice voting affect Alaska’s elections?

There is potential that after the first round, the person with more votes than other candidates – but not the majority – might lose the lead in the second round. That very situation might happen in Alaska Tuesday evening, Kosar speculated.

GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski  takes a picture with supporters in Talkeetna, Alaska, on Aug. 13, 2022.
(Lisa Murkowski re-election campaign)

“For one of the open positions, you have two Republicans running and one Democrat….