By Joy Overbeck | Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Ranked-choice voting (RCV), Proposition 131 on Colorado’s November ballot, is such a drastic perversion of our nation’s 247-year election standard of one person/one vote that voting for it risks actually losing your vote.
Rather than an improvement in election bi-partisanship and choice — its boosters are spending more than $8 million to convince voters, in practice, the candidates that get the most votes can lose, and those with the fewest votes may come out the winners. And your vote can even be trashed, thrown out, if you don’t follow the complicated directions.
This initiative would replace party primary ballots with “jungle” primaries for governor, treasurer, attorney general, secretary of state, state board of education, University of Colorado regent, and state and federal legislative seats. It starts with all candidates on the same “jungle” primary ballot; in Alaska’s recent congressional election, 48 candidates ran. The top four vote-getters then move on to the general election, where voters rank up to four candidates in order of preference. If none of them scores more than 50%, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and the ballots that chose the eliminated candidate as the first choice are now transferred to their second-choice candidate in the next round. This “instant runoff” continues until someone gets a majority. Ballots of voters who chose only the eliminated candidate are “exhausted,” or dead after the first round, while ballots choosing second, third and fourth candidates keep on voting.
Confused? Here’s a video showing just how it works. Spoiler: the candidate in third place at the start eventually wins!
This is how it worked – or didn’t work – under ranked-choice voting in New York City’s last mayoral election. Eric Adams got the most first-choice votes of any candidate, but it took eight rounds of kicking out other candidates before he was awarded the majority of votes and was finally declared the winner. Because confused election officials miscounted by including the wrong ballots, it was nearly a month before the winner could be certified. Even more outrageously, more than 140,000 ballots – nearly 15% of the votes cast – were actually thrown out because the voters weren’t filling in the complicated ballot correctly, or for other reasons. How is tossing your sacred right to vote in the trash even Constitutional?
Instead of the traditional election, in which the candidate who gets the most votes wins, ranked-choice voting insists the winning candidate must achieve more than 50% — just because they say so. But it’s a fake 50%, since many votes for the candidate are not really earned, but computed by transferring second-, third- and fourth-place votes the “winning” candidate didn’t actually receive at the start. So in reality, the winner wins with a plurality, not the majority the ranked-choice voting claims. Also a single ballot from one voter can award votes to up to three different candidates as votes are re-distributed from the same ballot. That’s the end of one person/one vote.
If you care about election integrity, you will run, not walk, from ranked-choice voting. Since this convoluted system is entirely dependent on computers to run the multiple logarithmic calculations to redistribute votes in round after round, the final vote cannot be recounted or audited. Computers, as many have realized, are not infallible, nor are they totally secure. Additionally, reconfiguring our election systems, staff training and other costs to accommodate ranked-choice voting will increase costs for each of our 64 counties by about $5 million for the primary and $4 million for the general election, according to the Colorado Blue Book. Will Kent Thiry, the very wealthy mastermind behind this ranked choice con, pay for it?
Scrambling our traditional election system has costly predictable consequences, and unpredictable ones as well. The candidates can score a spot on the “jungle” primary ballot through the traditional Democrat and Republican Party assembly process, or by petitioning on to the ballot. In a Colorado where politics is dominated by the Democrats, it’s uncertain whether Republican Party nominees will even get a place on the four-person general election ballot. One thing is pretty certain: the wealthiest politicians will bypass both parties and buy their way onto the ballot with massive, multi-million dollar ad campaigns and by purchasing petition signatures costing more than $10 each, hawked by paid professionals outside King Soopers.
That’s how multi-millionaire Kent Thiry bought the 213,000 signatures he needed to put Ranked-choice Voting Prop. 131 on the November ballot. Thiry is the former CEO of multi-billion-dollar kidney dialysis giant DaVita, headquartered in Denver. Instead of concerned citizens carrying hundreds of petitions in hopes to put an initiative on the ballot, Thiry and his pals paid Josh Penry’s Blitz Canvassing in Denver $2,227,250 to collect petition signatures. Altogether, elite corporate oligarchs with Jaguars and Maseratis, not Fords, in their garages (not that there’s anything wrong with it) ponied up more than $8.3 million to distort our elections to their personally preferred design.
The Thiry pals financing Prop. 131 include Ben Walton, grandson of the Walmart founder, who chipped in $1 million, and Wilmot Hastings of Santa Cruz, Calif., the executive chairman of Netflix, who tossed in $1.5 million. Thiry himself is anything but stingy, personally donating $1,427,250 so far. You’ll find zero people with ordinary incomes listed as contributors (see the secretary of state’s Tracer website).
Thiry also used the nonprofit he co-chairs, Unite America, to funnel $4.68 million into persuading voters to approve Prop. 131. That kind of money buys a monster bombardment of really convincing pro-Prop. 131 ads on TV and social media; $2.269 million worth of heavy-duty promo to be exact. It’s a tad curious that M2 Placement, the advertising firm to which the ranked-choice voting campaign paid that $2.269 million, is registered as a foreign company, yet shares the exact same Denver address as Penry’s Blitz Canvassing.
Also, on the pro-Prop. 131 payroll is two-time Colorado GOP chairman and dedicated never-Trumper Dick Wadhams, who Thiry’s committee has rewarded with $37,500 (so far) for his talents as a mouthpiece and consultant for their voting scheme. Of course, Penry himself has a strong GOP pedigree as a former legislator and Senate minority leader, but he told an interviewer in 2021 that he’s become “really disenchanted with both parties,” and a fan of balance and compromise. He doesn’t like people like Trump who think they’re right; instead he agrees with Thiry that “our politics is broken and needs balance.”
Kent Thiry wraps himself in the mystique of a selfless philanthropist, patriotically obsessed with perfecting American democracy, with no personal power agenda whatsoever. Not so fast, Slick. In 2017, he toyed with the idea of running for governor, and several Thiry-themed websites were registered, including ThiryforGovernor, ThiryforColorado and KentforColorado. Ultimately, fellow multi-millionaire Jared Polis stepped in to replace the term-limited Hickenlooper. Wealthy candidates have a huge advantage in Colorado because they can give money to their own campaigns without limit, instead of obeying the strict donation limits for regular folk. Just ask Polis. All of Colorado watched him spend more than $23 million of his own fortune to buy his first gubernatorial win in 2018, and then dump $12.6 million from his stash into his re-election in 2022, three times the funding of his Republican rival, Heidi Ganahl.
The biggest election 2022 spender in Colorado? Jared Polis — by a long shot.
With a personal fortune of about $44 million, Thiry may well be calculating that this new way of counting votes could tip gubernatorial victory his way in 2026, now that Polis himself is term-limited.
The duke of dialysis has been mucking about in Colorado politics for years. In 2020, he donated $2.4 million to pass Amendment B, which repealed the Gallagher Amendment and slammed homeowners with a hefty 40-50% increase in their property tax. Thanks, Kent. At the time, he insisted that the change would “freeze property tax rates” rather than levitating them into the stratosphere. I doubt he’s ever apologized. Thiry was also the co-chairman of Fair Districts Colorado, the group supporting Colorado’s 2018 Amendments Y and Z, which instituted redistricting commissions for Congressional and state legislative districts. Ironically, he now contends that those re-districted districts give voters no choice, but somehow ranked-choice voting will.
Clearly, he enjoys dabbling in power politics. Mr. Thiry fancies himself the champion of democracy and accuses both political parties of failing to represent the people or give voters choices. That’s quite the preposterous charge. He ignores that about 50% of the Colorado electorate are registered party members, and the nearly 50% of unaffiliateds are in effect unregistered party members, since most (thanks to the open primary Thiry got passed in 2016) regularly vote either the Democrat or Republican primary ballot.
The website promoting Prop. 131 proclaims, “Elections belong to voters, not political parties.” But the parties aren’t going away, no matter Thiry’s distaste. As long as our legislative system awards major power to whichever party wins the majority, anyone elected, whether by the distorted mess of ranked-choice, or the traditional one person/one vote, will need to ally with a party to get anything done. Ranked-choice voting is an underhanded attempt to break the parties. Should it fail, will Thiry’s next initiative outlaw them?
While the ranked-choice voting pushers want us to believe their system will increase bi-partisanship, decrease extremism and favor moderate candidates, there’s no proof of that anywhere it’s practiced. Besides, with the extreme issues Americans are facing in 2024, how is moderation a virtue? Party affiliation helps voters find candidates with whom their values are most aligned. A Republican candidate predictably stands for lower taxes and less government control, school choice, parents’ right to know if their child identifies as the opposite sex, secure borders, all-the-above energy, freedom of speech and gun rights. On the other side, majority Democrats in the statehouse legislate restrictions on speech, guns and fossil fuels, and approve more government funding in taxes and fees, illegal immigration, leniency laws for criminals, abortion up to the moment of birth, and woke sexualization of children in the schools. Which is extremist?
The ranked-choice gang claim their voting scheme is non-partisan. But take a look at the cheerleaders for ranked-choice. Start with the America-hating radical George Soros, and add Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, John Kerry, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Elizabeth Warren, Eric Swalwell, Adam Kinzinger, and our own Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet and U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse. Would far-left wokesters be supporting ranked-choice if it didn’t favor them winning? Vote NO on Prop. 131. Ranked choice is truly rank.
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist and longtime Douglas County Republican precinct leader whose work has appeared at Townhall.com, Complete Colorado, Rocky Mountain Voice, American Thinker, The Washington Times, The Federalist and elsewhere. Follow her on Facebook and on Twitter/X @joyoverbeck1
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.