teaThe smallest state legislature in the United States It has increased significantly recently. In its most recent session, the Alaska Senate, overcoming years of acrimony and gridlock, passed major bills aimed at increasing spending on public schools, fighting climate change and the state's energy shortages and strengthening penalties for drug dealers. “The universal feeling is that these have been the most productive two years we’ve ever had,” Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel told me.
Giessel, a Republican who first took office in 2010, attributed this success not to his colleagues but precisely to the way they were selected. In 2022, Alaska becomes the first state to experiment with a new kind of election. All candidates, regardless of party, competed against each other in the primary, with the top four vote-getters advancing. Last November, the winner was determined through ranked-choice voting, which ranked candidates in order of preference. This system, called Final Four Voting, gave a significant boost to moderates in both parties. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski won a fourth term, and the centrist Democrat defeated Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, winning a House seat that Republicans had held for half a century. occupied.
But the Final Four had a much bigger impact in the state Senate, where Democrats have long narrowed the Republican majority. Giessel, who had lost the traditional primary two years earlier, regained his seat. She and seven of her colleagues abandoned three far-right Republicans to form a coalition with the Democratic Party. The group decided to set aside divisive social issues like abortion and gender identity and focus only on areas where they could find common ground.
The legislative deal that followed was exactly what the architects of Final Four Voting had hoped for when Alaskans approved the system in a statewide referendum in 2020. In essence, the Final Four is a radical reform designed to deradicalize politics. The goal is to encourage compromise among lawmakers previously in power by making general elections more competitive and serving the small, polarized primary electorate that determines the winners of most modern campaigns. This year could be an inflection point for reform. Four states, ranging from blue to deep red, could adopt a version of the Final Four, and Alaskans will vote on whether to repeal it. In November, voters dissatisfied with both parties will have a chance to change how they elect their leaders. Or they will have a chance to derail what reformers hope will be the future of American elections.
FThe final four are not ideological in nature.But it will appeal most to voters frustrated with polarization — “ordinary people who want normal things to happen,” as former Murkowski aide Scott Kendall, who led the 2020 campaign to adopt a Final Four in Alaska, told me.
The idea of forming an Alaskan system is not new. California and Washington have had nonpartisan primaries for years, and South Dakota voters could approve them in November. Maine uses ranked-choice voting in federal elections. Oregon could adopt ranked voting this fall. But Alaska is the first state to combine both reforms. Final Four backers are pouring millions of dollars into expanding the ballot initiative this year to Nevada, Colorado, Idaho and Montana in hopes that more will follow.
The Final Four's elections will reshape not only state capitols but also Washington, D.C., which will elect up to 10 of the 100 U.S. senators over the next few years. Katherine Gehl, who designed Final Four Voting and invested millions of dollars into the campaign, said she represents a combination of red and blue states that can “form a problem-solving constituency” to solve issues that typically resist compromise. “Even if you only have 10 senators, you can see a difference in Congress,” she said, citing comprehensive immigration reform as an example.
To get on firmer footing, Final Four advocates must clear several obstacles. Critics say the system is too confusing for voters to understand and too complex for election officials to manage. They also question whether the reforms have as broad public support as their wealthy backers claim. The proposal faces bipartisan opposition in Nevada. Alaska's right-wing critics hope to scrap the system at an early stage.
And don't even get me started on Colorado.
The state's Democrats and Republicans disagree on almost everything. Except for their shared distaste for Final Four Voting and Kent Thiry, the businessman who is trying to bring it to their state. Thiry, the former CEO of Denver-based dialysis company DaVita, funded successful ballot campaigns that overhauled political primaries and enabled nonpartisan redistricting in Colorado. He is also co-chair of the reform group Unite America, which funds efforts to expand the Final Four in other states. Thiry believes that in a year when most voters don't like their presidential choice, the Final Four movement can “cut through the waves of discontent” and give people in Colorado and elsewhere a chance to vote for something new.
To Colorado Democratic Party Chairman Shad Murib, Thiry is simply throwing a “grenade” at an election system that the state's voters already like. “This is a way to rig elections in favor of the highest bidder,” he said, arguing that abolishing party primaries would make it easier for wealthy candidates to get on the ballot.
State Republican Party Chairman David Williams sees the proposal the same way. The highest bidder, he said, would be Thiry himself. “This is one thing me and my opponent agree on,” Williams said. “This man wants to destroy both political parties to get himself elected.”
Thiry said he considered running for governor in 2018 but is ruling out a run in 2026. He said critics of the Final Four are using the lure of past campaigns “as an excuse not to discuss the real stuff.” problem.”
But what he doesn't deny is that reforms like the Final Four are designed to reduce the power of the two major political parties. He compares American democracy rather pompously to a highway. Tyree said, “Political parties control both the on- and off-roads, and the tolls charged to ride the democratic highway are servile to the extreme left or extreme right, while relatively ignoring the majority in the middle.” he said “We plan to blow up the toll plaza and take back ownership of the highway.”
It's not yet known how much voters want these kinds of changes. Support for the Final Four owes more to a series of expensive persuasion campaigns funded by a group of wealthy philanthropists than to a grassroots movement. In most cases, they are bypassing state legislatures where party leaders are uninterested in reforms that could threaten their rule.
Colorado Democrats say there's no need to fix the voting system. Participation in all-mail elections is already among the highest in the nation, and Democratic governors and senators are relatively moderate negotiators. “This is a solution in search of a problem.” Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of Colorado's congressional delegation, told me. To prevent a Final Four, state legislatures have passed bills that could block voter-approved election reforms from being implemented for years, or perhaps forever. Final Four backers are urging Gov. Jared Polis to veto it.
Critics see the system as both unnecessary and a tool for wealthy centrists seeking to carve a path to high office for themselves and their allies. But reformers point out that campaigns are now not exactly the preserve of the poor or the middle class. Rich people, including those in Colorado, are already taking it easy. Polis, for example, is a tech entrepreneur who self-financed his first bid for Congress a decade ago and then spent more than $20 million of his own money to win the seat in 2018. “They're just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,” Gehl said of the Final Four's critics. She pointed out that the system guarantees there will be four candidates on the November ballot instead of two. She asked, “If the number of people allowed into Disney World doubles, how does that reduce accessibility?” She said.
In Alaska, the Final Four has so far not favored wealthy job seekers very much. In fact, it seemed to attract candidates from lesser-known backgrounds. In 2022, Alaska Natives won seats in Congress for the first time, and more women ran for office than in the previous five cycles combined. “Open primaries open the door not only to women, but also to minorities,” Giessel said. “The game has completely changed.”
teaHe made his Final Four debut In Alaska, we had a hard time. The sudden death of 88-year-old Rep. Don Young on a plane in March 2022 opened up Alaska's lone House seat for the first time since he took office in 1973 and forced the state to roll out a new system through special legislation. The election came months ahead of schedule.
“I felt confused,” said Kendall, a Final Four activist. Mary Peltola, a centrist and Murkowski supporter, ran as a Democrat and defeated both Palin and another Republican, Nick Begich, through ranked-choice voting. Although the two Republicans received more votes overall than Peltola in early tallies, more than a quarter of Begich voters rated the Democrat higher than Palin.
Republicans responded to the defeat by slamming ranked-choice voting, reflecting their opposition to Maine's system, which voters approved after Trump's governor, Paul LePage, won two victories . Critics of Alaska's system succeeded in gathering enough signatures to put a repeal measure on the November ballot, which Kendall is fighting in court.
Phillip Izon, who is leading the repeal movement, said Alaska's system is “fundamentally flawed” and will require “generations” of voter education for people to properly understand it. He noted that many voters refused to rank candidates in the special election and that voter turnout declined in the subsequent midterm elections in November. “They said it was cheaper. They say it's faster. “They say it helps third parties,” he said. “And none of this is true.”
The crux of Izon's criticism is that Alaskans didn't want the Final Four in the first place. In 2020, changes to the state's election system were packaged into a single ballot question along with other proposed changes. Most notable was the popular push to ban “dark money” from state campaigns. Izon claimed voters had been “brainwashed” into approving the Final Four. Izon said he is not registered with any political party and he does not want his efforts to be categorized by his partisanship. But a video posted on his campaign website begins with a quote from Donald Trump denouncing “ranked-choice garbage voting” as a “totally rigged deal.”
Supporters of the system say Izon is misrepresenting or exaggerating his claims. “I had no intention of hiding the ball,” Kendall said, referring to the 2020 referendum. Nor are Republicans wiped out in the 2022 Final Four. Despite losing a House seat to Peltola and several seats in the Legislature, conservative Gov. Mike Dunleavy easily won re-election. “Last time we had a lot more opponents than we have now,” Kendall said.
But the Final Four champion is clearly uneasy about the repeal effort, worried it could hinder the idea's momentum not only in Alaska but elsewhere. The fact that Alaskans could be so quick to abandon the system provides a convenient talking point for opponents in other states. In Nevada, for example, voters approved a version of the system in 2022 (with five finalists instead of four), but the state constitution requires them to approve it again this fall for it to go into effect. “Change is difficult. Anything new is hard and it’s hard to make a case in a busy year,” Gehl said.
When I spoke to Thiry, he seemed set for a bit of a loss. “Voters aren’t going to just fall for the first fantastic new idea they hear or see,” he said. “If you look at the history of American movements, every movement we've looked at took a huge hit early on, but persevered. And we have every intention of doing the same.”