Tom Brooks’ letter (“Ranked choice isn’t new,” Nov. 25) attempted to use history to justify the absurdity of ranked choice voting. But Brooks’ logic is flawed.
Going outside the analogy of the 1860 Republican National Convention to support the inherently flawed system, let’s look at what the results of the 1860 presidential election would have been.
We all know Republican Abraham Lincoln won with a plurality of the vote — 39.8% to Democrat Stephen A. Douglas’ 29.5%. Distribute a conservative 75% of the fourth-place candidate’s votes — likeminded slavery proponent John Bell of Tennessee and the Constitutional Union Party — to Douglas and a liberal 25% to Lincoln, and Honest Abe is up to 43% of the vote. Still not a majority, so we split Douglas’ ally, slaveholder and third-place candidate John C. Breckenridge of the Southern Democrat Party’s votes along the same lines. That pushes Douglas to 53% of the vote and the presidency.
America would have delayed a civil war for another decade or two while the technology of war became even more deadly. A civil war of the 1880s or 1890s would be infinitely more ghastly — machine guns, more accurate artillery, toxic gas deployments and trench warfare — than the one of 1861-65. Meanwhile, millions of slaves would have continued to toil on the cotton plantations of the South.
Math is hard, but voting shouldn’t have to be.
Only a society truly interested in quashing the voice of the majority would want any part of ranked choice voting. And that’s exactly what Alaska did this month, giving two candidates — Lisa Murkowski and Mary Peltola — who wouldn’t have come close to winning the majority of the state’s, or their party’s, respectively, support in a traditional vote being pushed across the finish line by nothing more than the desires of the losing candidates’ voters’ and pixie dust.
— Jeff Olsen
Fairbanks
Have something on your mind? Send to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Letters under 200 words have the best chance of being published. Writers should disclose any personal or professional connections with the subjects of their letters. Letters are edited for accuracy, clarity and length.