The Alaska Supreme Court ruled Friday, August 28, that state election officials largely met their legal duty to write “true and impartial” language describing a November ballot measure that would repeal the state’s ranked-choice voting and open-primary system, rejecting most of the objections raised by both sides while ordering one addition to the measure’s summary.
What the measure would do
The initiative, which will appear on Alaska ballots this fall as Ballot Measure 2, would repeal the top-four open primary and ranked-choice general election system Alaska voters narrowly adopted in 2020, restore party primaries, and repeal the campaign finance disclosure rules enacted alongside the original 2020 measure. A nearly identical repeal effort failed by just 664 votes in 2024, and supporters gathered enough signatures to put the question back before voters two years later.
The legal fight over ballot wording
Because how a ballot measure is described can meaningfully shape how voters interpret and vote on it, both supporters and opponents of the repeal sued the Alaska Division of Elections over the language it drafted, each accusing the division of bias in the opposite direction. The Alaska Supreme Court heard oral arguments on August 25 in an expedited proceeding, given the proximity to the November election and the need for finality before ballots go to print.
In its ruling, the court affirmed a lower Superior Court finding that the division’s title and summary were prepared in a true and impartial manner, rejecting arguments from repeal opponents that the language was slanted toward passage and rejecting, separately, arguments from repeal supporters that the summary was slanted toward the status quo. The justices did identify one specific omission: the summary must now explicitly note that if the measure passes and the state’s nonpartisan, open primary system is eliminated, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor would once again run as separate candidates rather than as a single ticket, a structural change voters would otherwise have to infer.
Arguments from both sides
Groups defending Alaska’s current ranked-choice system, including some of the same coalition that narrowly beat back the 2024 repeal attempt, argued the division’s draft language downplayed how sweeping the rollback would be, since it would unwind not just ranked-choice voting but also the open primary and disclosure provisions in a single vote. They said Alaskans deserve ballot language that makes clear all three changes are bundled together.
Groups backing repeal countered that ranked-choice voting has confused voters and produced results that do not reflect a straightforward majority preference, and they argued the division’s language, before the court’s ordered correction, obscured how the measure would restore a more traditional primary system that most other states still use. Both sides claimed partial vindication in the ruling: repeal opponents got the disclosure about separate gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial races added, which they said better informs voters of the measure’s full scope, while repeal supporters noted the court otherwise left the division’s core language intact over the objections raised against it.
Why Alaska is being watched nationally
Alaska remains one of only two states, along with Maine, using ranked-choice voting statewide, and its 2024 repeal vote, decided by fewer than 700 votes out of more than 340,000 cast, has made it a closely watched bellwether for the ranked-choice movement nationally. Nineteen states have now banned ranked-choice voting for at least some elections, including Indiana and Ohio, which enacted bans earlier this year, while Virginia moved in the opposite direction by authorizing statewide use of the method. National groups on both sides of the ranked-choice debate have already begun directing money and volunteers into Alaska ahead of November, viewing the state’s decision as a potential model, or cautionary tale, for similar fights elsewhere.
What comes next
The Division of Elections must now revise its ballot summary to include the court-ordered addition before ballots are finalized for the state’s mail-heavy voting system, which begins mailing ballots to voters in mid-October. With the corrected language locked in, both campaigns say they will shift fully into voter outreach, and observers expect the race to again be close given how narrowly the last repeal attempt failed. The outcome will determine not just how Alaskans elect their governor, legislature and lone U.S. House seat going forward, but also whether the state’s brief experiment with top-four ranked-choice elections survives its second trip to the ballot.
Photo: The Alaska Landmine / BY via flickr
