On Friday, Valley voters will have an opportunity to hear from election experts about a proposed voting scheme that could end up on the 2024 ballot.
The “No on Ranked Choice Voting” event will feature Congressman Andy Biggs and will explore what opponents like Biggs believe is a dangerous and complicated system of voting that disenfranchises voters.
The event will be held at the Silver Star Theater, located at 5247 East Brown Road, In Mesa. Registration begins at 9:00 a.m.
The America First Policy Institute, Voter Reference Foundation, and the Free Enterprise Club are instrumental in bringing the event to the Valley, which has been a target for Ranked Choice Voting and “Jungle Primary” proponents.
A group that calls itself “Make Elections Fair PAC” has launched an effort to collect nearly 400,000 voter signatures to place onto the 2024 ballot, a proposal to completely undo Arizona’s primary election system.
The proposal would effectively scrap Arizona’s partisan primaries and create a jungle primary system where every candidate would appear on the same ballot and every voter would get to vote on all of them. The proposal leaves gaps in the law because it does not specify how many candidates will advance to the general election and is already attracting criticism from both Republicans and Democrats.
Last year, the group led by political consultant Chuck Coughlin gave up on pushing a Ranked Choice voting scheme, but indicated they were not giving up on the idea of pushing a complete reworking of Arizona’s voting process. An earlier article from Capitol Media Services described the group’s plan “to convince Arizona voters to scrap the method of nominating candidates: play on their feelings about how bad the current system really is and sell them the idea of how much better it could be.”
Supporters of ranked choice voting and jungle primaries say the schemes would address what some see as “primary season extremism” in which candidates can move through to the general election by a simple majority of the votes cast even if the candidate fails to receive a true majority of 50 percent plus one of the votes.
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