I had the distinct pleasure of watching more than one American election from a distant war zone—one struggling through its own fledgling attempts at democracy.
That perspective gave me a special disdain for the short-sightedness of the petty, partisan complaints about our elections—especially the ones that only seem to happen when the outcome isn’t what we want. Still, with every Washington, D.C. deficit spending bill and every new overreach into the lives, pocketbooks, and businesses of everyday Americans, it’s easy to see why folks could feel like the game is rigged and the rules are broken.
Many activists, non-profits, and state legislators have taken on the challenge of rebuilding faith in our elections. Unfortunately, others have chosen instead to try to capitalize on the distrust for their own benefit, with election snake-oil schemes that purport to cure whatever ails local politics but deliver chaos (and their own favored outcome) instead.
The worst of these is ranked-choice voting, which is being aggressively pushed by Democrats (and some misguided Republicans in Wisconsin) coast to coast.
Branded by many names and variations, this scheme is the greatest preventable threat to election integrity and the conservative movement across the country today. While it is sold as a “majority consensus system,” the reality is, it’s an election weapon designed to benefit the political Left, which sponsors 92 percent of ranked-choice voting bills.
In some states with fractured Republican movements, ranked-choice voting is sold to frustrated conservatives to gain ground. Here in Wisconsin, “Final Five” is sold to Never-Trump Republicans as a system to keep Trump candidates out of elected office and encourage more moderates to run. At the same time, “Final Five” is sold to Patriot Groups as the only way to get Trump candidates elected. Ranked-choice voting’s leftist bankrollers betray its real purpose—which is why five states have already banned it and more have proposed bans, including the Wisconsin ban led by principled conservative Senators Duey Stroebel and Steve Nass and Representatives Ty Bodden and Chanz Green.
Our legislature and congressional delegation are the only branches of government the Left does not control in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, one has been tricked into trying to sabotage the other.
We’ve seen a coordinated, decade-long smear campaign against voting maps, voter ID, ballot integrity, and even Republican legislators themselves, attempting to de-legitimize them and the people who elected them. While the newly minted liberal Supreme Court attacks the legislature through the front door, ranked-choice voting (and its predictable results) represents an attack through the back door—a Trojan Horse that will destroy our elections from within and remove Wisconsin from the list of “swing states” forever.
Beside this transparent pincer movement for liberals to capture seats of power they cannot win through traditional elections in Wisconsin, the most appalling features of ranked-choice voting are its hidden mechanism of voter tabulation and the one-sided outcomes it produces.
Ranked-choice voting is a tool of voter suppression that takes lawfully cast ballots and then trashes them, removing them from consideration in round after round of central count, black-box algorithmic tabulation that happens before declaring a fake majority that excludes thousands of trashed ballots. This has been demonstrated in elections in Maine and Alaska, where 8,000 and 15,000 voters respectively had their ballots trashed. We’ve seen voter participation plunge in Maine, and Alaska will certainly follow suit.
It’s a nightmare that the good people of Wisconsin (and frankly the entire country) don’t deserve. It’s the opposite of rebuilding faith and trust in elections and let’s not forget that this solves problems that don’t even exist in Wisconsin. You have to go back 30 years to find ONE U.S. House race—in 1994—in which the winner garnered 49.4 percent. Do “issues” that happen once every 30 years require fixing? And for the 1,400 state assembly races since 2000, 99.3 percent hit the 50-percent-plus-one threshold. Ranked-choice voting is a “solution” looking for a problem.
Do we have an extreme candidate problem? Wisconsin voters elected Sen. Ron Johnson (R) and Gov. Tony Evers (D) side-by-side in the same election. I’ve personally knocked on tens of thousands of doors in Wisconsin elections and can attest to the willingness of our voters to split tickets when poor candidates are on the ballot. That’s a feature of democracy, not a bug.
Democracy is a participation system. If you want better candidates, you tell the good Wisconsinites in your life to run for something and then you support them. You collect signatures, raise money, knock on doors, and make phone calls for them (Facebook fights don’t count).
Ranked-choice voting is an open attack on the only democratic part of our system. It’s a system that has worked since the founding of our country to produce the freest, fairest, most prosperous society in the history of mankind. Ranked-choice rigs the system to produce the desired result: electing extreme liberals. And in Wisconsin, that means delivering our entire congressional delegation to the Democrats regardless of what the real majority of voters want.
I enlisted to defend the Constitution and to guard freedom and the American way of life. I won’t stand idly by while those ideals are destroyed by a rigged voting system promoted by those who seek to suppress the votes of American citizens.
