We’re trying again to repeal ranked-choice voting here in the Great Land, and the process has now passed its first hurdle. The petition has been drafted, and the process of gathering signatures is starting now. In 2024, the repeal effort failed by a narrow margin – fewer than a thousand votes – despite being outspent massively by money from Outside. But there’s a new team running the initiative this time, and they are taking a different approach.

The second effort to repeal ranked-choice voting began its next big phase on Saturday, with the signature-gathering effort launched at the Governor’s Prayer Breakfast in Anchorage. Petition books have been distributed across the state by the group REPEAL NOW, which is headed up by Bernadette Wilson, Bethany Marcum, and Judy Eledge.

The first effort to repeal ranked-choice voting was vastly outspent by opponents with Outside dark money, yet came within a few hundred signatures from repealing the novel voting method put in place — again, with dark money supporters — in 2020.

REPEAL NOW’s campaign focuses on educating voters about the complexities inherent the RCV system, which is confusing and ends up with many more spoiled and uncounted ballots than regular voting. This time, the REPEAL NOW group is doing a straight repeal of the 2020 law that voters passed through initiative.

The system is complicated; while standing in line to vote in 2022, the first year the ranked-choice system was in use, the Republicans had two major candidates in the race for Alaska’s sole House seat, Nick Begich III and Sarah Palin, while the Democrats ran only Mary Peltola; I overheard several people talking about ranking their votes, saying, “I’m just going to vote for Nick/Sarah and that’s it.” That may have cost us that election, as well as seeing Princess Lisa Murkowski comfortably edging out Kelly Tshibaka, who would likely have won the GOP primary in the old system. Still, Alaska’s Republicans may be figuring it out, as in 2024, Nick Begich III was the sole major Republican candidate on the ticket – and he sent Mary Peltola back to Bethel.

The pro-repeal group now is talking fund-raising in addition to signature-gathering, and that’s going to be necessary.

The group is now planning to raise funds to educate the public about the choice between the current system of voting in Alaska, which Democrats and Sen. Lisa Murkowski support, and the regular method of voting that American voters have used since voting began in 1788’s with the election of George Washington as the nation’s first president.

As Alaska is the last bastion of 2024’s attempt to impose ranked-choice voting on a grander scale, the proponents of that system, who are almost universally from the left, are sure to bend every effort to make sure the repeal fails again. That means that the repeal effort will once again, face scads of money from Outside.