> 60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat ‘won.’
We might dismiss this as self-serving and disingenuous, but I actually have some sympathy for the claim that ballot exhaustion "disenfranchises voters", since it means that voters who have done more research about all the candidates (and can thus express a fuller set of preferences) potentially have their votes included in more rounds than less-informed voters (whose ballots are discarded earlier).
I suppose some people might think that more-informed voters should be given more power at the ballot box than their fellow citizens, but this seems equivalent to (for example) requiring voters to have a college degree, or passing a "literacy" test (which is a barrier that has historically been abused for purely partisan goals).
Anyway, we shouldn't be too surprised that RCV produced a result that was open to such criticism, since a similar thing happened back in 2009 during the mayoral elections of Burlington, Vermont.[1] The unintuitive outcome lead to RCV being scrapped for future elections there, and I fear that failures of RCV for state-wide elections could cause similar disillusionment with the idea of voting reform in other states.
One cause for optimism, however, is that Burlington did end up changing its mind again, and approving RCV in 2021, so perhaps the bad experience was only a temporary setback. It would still be prudent, however, to consider other types of reform, to be tried in different states, which are, after all, the laboratories of democracy.
[0] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/3624553-re...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...