The Juneau Assembly wants to use ranked choice voting for city elections? This on top of vote by mail? No! Each of these systems has the effect of diminishing the value of our shared civic responsibility and distancing the voter from the counting process. They both add unnecessary delay in announcing election results. Ranked choice at the state level adds two or three weeks to reveal results. People are suspicious about what happens during these long counting processes. Each adds more cost to run an election. The city invested $700,000 in a facility just to deal with vote by mail. Nothing has been disclosed about the cost of adding ranked choice to this mess.
A lot of people were unhappy enough with vote by mail that a petition to remove it came within 15 signatures of qualifying for the next city election. I would not be surprised if those people try again for 2026. Two other petitions DID qualify: a cap on property tax mill rate and removal of sales tax on food. You will be able to vote on those two issues this fall. You will NOT be able to vote on the ranked choice question. The Assembly can do this on their own authority.
The ranked choice issue is whirling on a statewide basis and I wrote about it on these pages last month. We are still gathering signatures and with luck, we will be able to vote to repeal it, again, statewide, in the fall of 2026. I sure hope we don’t have to do the same thing at the city level. But please, be careful not to confuse the state-level ranked choice matter with the local ranked choice issue. Both are bad but each is following a different path.
Why should you care about these dramatic revisions to our election systems? Well, the main reason is that they don’t produce the benefits that their proponents claim they will. Both ranked choice and vote by mail are touted as increasing voter participation. They don’t. In the case of vote by mail in Juneau, consider this: The average voter turnout in the five city elections from 2015 to 2019 was 30.4%. In 2020 it was 42.7%. In 2021, the first year vote by mail was implemented, turnout dropped yes, dropped! to 30.8% and it didn’t get much higher after that until 2024 when it was up to 38.7%. Vote by mail does not drive voter turnout, passion does.
In 2020 two Assembly seats were hotly contested and there was a well-organized campaign to vote against creating a commission to review the city charter. In 2024 there was a competitive race for mayor and a controversial city hall bond issue. Plenty of passion on both. I think the electorate was fairly content with how things had been running during the 2010-2019 period and that substantial discontent began with vote by mail in 2020 and continues to this day.
Vote by mail was also touted as making elections more accessible to people that were homebound, had mobility problems, or were out of town during the election season. There was already a system for obtaining an absentee ballot in place. The voter had to request it, but the system was there and it was fair.
The primary reason for opposing ranked choice voting and vote by mail is that they reduce public confidence in the credibility and integrity of the election system. As I said at the beginning, both systems put barriers between the voter and the tabulation process; both delay the results; and both impede the public visibility needed to assure election integrity.
I am not saying that the inventors and proponents of vote by mail and ranked choice voting intended these negative effects. I am sure their intentions were noble enough but are frankly grounded in a naïve sense of being part of some think-tank inspired movement to improve elections. Both vote by mail and ranked choice voting are derived from academic and aristocratic sources and smell of contempt for the voter. Please tell your Assembly members to save taxpayer money and not adopt ranked choice voting. Juneau just doesn’t need it.
Murray R. Walsh is a retired land use consultant in Juneau.
