Mary Peltola wins first Alaska election for Congress to use ranked-choice voting

I have some special election news for my readers to begin September. MSNBC reported Democrat Peltola Defeats Palin In Special Alaska House Race, NBC News Projects during "All In with Chris Hayes" last night.

NBC News projects Democrat Mary Peltola wins the special election for the Alaska House seat, defeating Sarah Palin.

NBC News Now had more in Peltola Beats Palin In Alaska House Special Election on Joshua Johnson's show.

NBC News’ projects that Democrat Mary Peltola beat Sarah Palin in Alaska’s special election for a U.S. House seat. Peltola will become the first Alaska Native elected to Congress. NBC News’ Jonathan Allen reports.

That's a result that may not have happened with party primaries and first past the post winners, although Mary Peltola still led the first round of voting before second place choices were reassigned. Still, as Jonathan Allen observed, ranked-choice voting works as well to stop someone from winning as to ensure that the genuinely more popular candidate wins. Umichvoter on Twitter created this graphic to show how that happened in the special election.


Yes, the majority of Begich (which Umichvoter misspelled, sigh) voters had Sarah Palin as their second choice, but not enough to push her ahead of Peltola. As someone who has been critical of Sarah Palin for more than a decade, I'm glad they voted that way.

This is only for the remainder of the late Don Young's term. Alaska will do this all over again in November for the upcoming regular term. Stay tuned to see how that turns out.