Wisconsin Republicans Have the Power to Stop Ranked-Choice Voting—Now Use It

Ranked-choice voting threatens to undermine election integrity and turn Wisconsin into a Democrat stronghold. Don’t make an unforced error.

There’s no faster way to turn Wisconsin solid blue than with ranked-choice voting. Yet amazingly, some Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature seem hellbent on doing just that—and Democrats are more than happy to oblige them.

In December, a set of Republican state senators joined Democrat minority leaders to introduce SB 528, which would implement a ranked-choice voting (RCV) scheme for congressional races. While a number of localities allow RCV for local races, only three states—Alaska, Maine, and Hawaii—have authorized it for federal elections, making Wisconsin the fourth to subject voters to this dangerous experiment if the bill passes.

If you don’t grasp how RCV works, well, that’s the point. RCV, which is sometimes called “final five” or instant runoff voting, radically changes how ballots works by asking voters to rank multiple candidates in order of their preference for a single office. Instead of choosing just one person to vote for, as Americans have done for centuries, the system demands you study in detail every single candidate on a ballot—and then vote for all of them. Tabulators take those results and run through a series of rounds, with each round dropping off the lowest vote-getter until the final candidate is declared the winner.

In practice, that might mean stacking 5 candidates on a 1–5 scale beginning with your top pick, many of whom will come from the same party and split the Republican vote. That’s what happened in Alaska in 2022, when Republican congressional candidates won more votes than the Democrat but split the vote—leading to a Democrat victory for the first time in decades in a state that broke 10 points for Donald Trump in 2020. Ditto Maine in 2018.

In both races, confused voters only filled in a single bubble on their ballots—as they’d been doing for decades—leading tabulators to trash 8,000 ballots in Maine and 15,000 in Alaska, respectively.

“Ranked-choice voting has sewn chaos and confusion everywhere it’s been tried. Neither the voters nor vote counters fully understand how it works,” Center for Election Confidence executive director Lisa Dixon told Restoration News. “First and foremost, voters need transparency to trust the process. RCV is a dangerous voting scheme meant to undermine America’s founding principle of one-man, one-vote.” (It’s also worth checking out CEC’s powerful study refuting RCV published in January.)

Under traditional election rules, Wisconsin is a true purple state that routinely elects a Republican majority in the legislature and a Democrat to the governor’s mansion. Under RCV, however, voters should expect to see a Democrat takeover of the legislature as thousands of Republican voters have their ballots trashed. For anyone concerned with the Left’s efforts to disenfranchise millions of Republicans nationwide, that’s alarming.

Five states have banned RCV to date; Georgia Republicans are considering banning it, too. What they realize is that RCV was devised by the activist Left as a weapon for conquering red states. The proof is in their behavior. In May 2023, the D.C. Democratic Party voted against adopting RCV because they feared it would “undermine the strength of Democrats” in the district.

Contrast that with the D.C. “dark money” that narrowly bought RCV in Alaska in 2020 and is angling to keep it in 2024, despite local conservatives’ efforts to save it from an out-of-state takeover.

(READ MORE: Ranked-Choice Voting Will Turn Georgia Blue)

RCV is pushed by the Maryland-based Fairvote, which also aims to abolish the Electoral College and lower the voting age to 16. The public may see these as unrelated ideas, but to professional activists they’re a strategy for permanent Democrat control of the states and federal government. FairVote actually boasts that its election “reforms” would clinch 2 more Democrat congressional seats in Georgia.

That’s why the biggest “progressive” mega-funders are bankrolling the RCV machine, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Tides Foundation. Why are Wisconsin Republicans caving to their demands?

Instead, the Senate ought to throw its support behind an existing Assembly resolution to ban ranked-choice voting in the Wisconsin constitution. Conservatives, you can’t afford not to.