Several grassroots groups, including the Voter Reference Foundation run by Arizona Republican Party Chair Gina Swoboda, put on election integrity training in Scottsdale and Tucson on Monday. Organized by America First Policy Institute (AFPI), speakers from the Honest Elections Project, Heritage Action for America, Save Our States Action, and American Constitutional Rights Union Action taught attendees how to work at the polls, observe elections, and educated them on the Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) proposition on the ballot and efforts to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Jordan Kittleson, policy director of AFPI, moderated the event, asking the experts questions and commenting on them.
Jason Snead of the Honest Elections Project said the focus of RCV is to “push politics to the Left.” He went over why RCV was nicknamed “jungle primaries” due to all the logistical problems. Snead said the average primary race around the country has 17 candidates. That means there are likely to be 17 separate votes as the candidates get whittled down — voters must come back and vote repeatedly. The way RCV works is that as long as no candidate gets over 50 percent of the vote, the candidate with the least votes gets eliminated in each round of voting.
He talked about “ballot exhaustion,” where voters’ choices of candidates are not counted since those candidates were eliminated in earlier rounds of voting. Snead said RCV is so complicated that the government in New York spent $15 million attempting to explain it to voters. Due to ballot exhaustion, 140,000 votes weren’t counted in the 2021 New York mayoral race, which Democrat Eric Adams ultimately won. Kittleson added that it took six weeks to determine the race’s outcome.
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