In November 2022, Alaska saw its lowest voter turnout in any general election since 1980. While it’s tempting to try to blame a single flashy reason for that fact, there are many factors that can raise and lower overall voter turnout: voter interest, competitive high-profile contests, media coverage, ballot access, even the weather on Election Day. Another factor that can impact voter turnout: changes in election laws, such as Alaska’s 2022 implementation of ranked choice voting (RCV).
Since higher voter turnout is a win for all of us, it’s important to find out if ranked choice voting has any impact on voter turnout and how that impact stacks up against the system’s other pros and cons. In this article, I’ll walk through how I calculate voter turnout, how I explore a data set to investigate any changes in voter turnout, and what the November 2022 election can tell us about ranked choice voting’s impact on turnout. (Spoiler: it can’t tell us much.)
What’s in a denominator?
To start, 267,047 Alaskans cast a ballot in November 2022. Simple! But not super useful without any context. Is that high? Is it low? How does it compare to other elections or other states?
In the 1958 election for Alaska statehood, only about 48,000 people cast a ballot. Down in Washington state, more than 3 million people voted in the 2022 general election. Comparing the raw number of voters in Alaska in 2022 to these two numbers doesn’t say much about voting behavior. All it really shows is that way more people live in Alaska now than in 1958, and that way more people live in Washington now than in Alaska.
Since the raw numbers lump together differences in voting behavior with differences in population, I can isolate the impact of voting behavior by dividing the raw vote count by some measure of population. Choosing the right denominator is important for calculating voter turnout.
A few different measures of population are useful for understanding different aspects of voter turnout. Total residents is useful for assessing the impact of large-scale disenfranchisement,1 but the huge number of legally ineligible voters under 18 will drown out the smaller impacts that I’m concerned with here. Registered voters is good for administrative checks (because each voter is listed individually, unlike aggregate census data) or when assessing partisan turnout differences, but factors such as automatic voter registration can artificially decrease registered voter turnout by increasing the number of registered voters. The sweet spot for the Alaska election turnout analysis is the voting-eligible population, a metric published by researchers at the University of Florida that counts the number of people who are legally eligible to vote in a given jurisdiction.2 Many election researchers prefer the voting-eligible population as a gold standard for calculating voter turnout in their analyses.
So! In Alaska’s 2022 general election, 267,047 voters cast a ballot. That’s 50.27 percent of the state’s 531,272 eligible voters.
Next, to figure out if that number is meaningful or unusual, I’ll compare it to the state’s previous general elections.
Visualizing and contextualizing
Now that I know what data I’m working with, my next step in trying to find any stories that the data is telling is to visualize this data. Turning the data into a plot or graph often makes it easier to spot trends or details that wouldn’t be clear from the numbers alone. I typically focus my attention on ranges (the spread of the values), patterns (any trends or repetitions), outliers (unusual points that break patterns), and subgroups and supergroups (comparisons between sections of the data or to other data sources).
Ranges
Looking at the range of the data is a useful start to finding any lessons or highlights from the information. We want to understand all the values our data could take and the values it takes in practice. I’ll start with a line graph of voter turnout in Alaska’s general elections over time.
There’s not always a clear start or end date when working with data collected over time. Sometimes I’ll choose a round number in multiples of 5 or 10. Sometimes the availability of the data provides a natural cutoff. For this chart, I’ve shown voter turnout from 1980 (the first year that the voting-eligible population data is available) until the year 2022 (the most recent general election).
Because it’s a percentage, voter turnout can range from 0 percent (no one votes) to 100 percent (every eligible person votes). In practice, voter turnout in Alaska’s general elections since 1980 has varied between 50 percent and 70 percent (most people vote).
Patterns
After getting a sense of where the data lies, I start to look for any patterns that might tell a story. One clear pattern in the chart above is an up-and-down zigzag shape showing that turnout is higher in years divisible by four and lower in the in-between years.
Why does this pattern show up? This data alone doesn’t answer why, so we’ll have to look elsewhere for explanations. One major reason is that the high-profile presidential election is up for grabs in years divisible by four. Across the United States, when the president is on the ballot, voter turnout in the general election is consistently higher than in midterm years with just Congressional and state races.
Outliers
Then I like to check for any outliers—data points that don’t fit in the same range or patterns as the bulk of the observations. Here’s that same graph with the presidential and midterm elections highlighted separately.
From this version, I see that presidential election turnout is almost always a few points higher than midterm election turnout. The one exception is in 1982, when midterm turnout peaked at 65 percent of eligible voters.
Why was turnout so much higher in 1982 than in future midterms? Again, this data alone doesn’t offer any explanations. One reason may have been a high-profile ballot measure in 1982 where voters rejected spending the money needed to move the state’s capital to Willow, killing the move that voters approved in 1974 and 1976.
Aside from that high turnout in 1982, midterm election turnout has chugged along between 50 and 56 percent over the past 40 years. The 2022 general election was not an outlier for voter turnout. While it saw a hair lower turnout than in other elections since 1980, that decrease seems to fit the typical historical variation.
Subgroups
Another way to assess voter turnout is to compare it among different subgroups, such as the different offices on the ballot, geographic regions of the state, and political parties.
Overall, 50 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 2022 general election. But not every voter marked a choice in every single contest on the ballot. Turnout for statewide races such as governor (49 percent) and US senator (49 percent) stayed pretty high, but fewer and fewer people voted in local races. (Turnout in State House races was 45 percent, on average, and turnout for judicial contests was 41 percent, on average.)3 Put another way, only 1 percent of ballots cast left the gubernatorial race blank, but 18 percent of ballots skipped the retention race for a Court of Appeals judge.
Sightline has already briefly covered turnout differences by geography and political party in the 2022 general election, but I’ll recap the highlights: The lowest-turnout state legislative districts in 2022 were concentrated among rural, heavily Alaska Native districts and urban districts with military bases. Voter turnout among Democrats, Republicans, and registered nonpartisan voters was about the same, but turnout was notably lower among third-party and undeclared voters.4
Supergroups
In addition to turning in and looking at different groups within Alaska, we can turn outward and look to a supergroup, such as the rest of the US, for a comparison. I’ll return to that same line chart, isolate midterm election turnout, and compare Alaska to the US as a whole.
Alaska has historically had high voter turnout relative to the rest of the country, especially in midterm elections. From 1982 to 2014, Alaska never dropped lower than tenth-highest voter turnout in a midterm among the 50 states.
Looking at the right side of the chart, two things are noticeable. First, Alaska’s five-point turnout drop from 2018 to 2022 looks a lot like the country’s four-point turnout drop. Second, turnout in Alaska declined slightly from 2014 to 2018 while nationwide voter turnout shot up. What happened there?
My first thought was that this was part of the “blue wave” in the 2018 midterm election. If that were the case, I would expect turnout to rise most in blue states or in swing states where Democratic voters felt they could push their candidate over the finish line. But this wasn’t the case. Actually, the states with the highest increase in turnout from 2014 to 2018 spanned the political spectrum, including deep-red states such as Indiana, Missouri, and Utah. In fact, every single state (plus Washington, D.C.) saw higher voter turnout in 2018 than in 2014—except for Alaska. For now, I don’t have a strong theory as to why Alaska got left behind from the turnout bump that the rest of the country experienced in 2018.
Explaining 2022’s turnout drop—or at least trying to
Finally, the big question: what caused voter turnout to go down in 2022? This is pretty tough to answer because the drop from 2018 to 2022 was so modest compared to historical variation. If there had been a huge drop in 2022—if 2022 were a clear outlier for voter turnout—it would be easier to point to something that changed in 2022 as the culprit. But since the turnout drop is consistent with historical changes in turnout, the same factors that caused turnout to vary in all those previous elections could also be contenders here.
One big change in Alaska’s 2022 general election was the introduction of ranked choice voting. There’s not much evidence to rule out whether ranked choice voting caused the turnout drop, but there’s also not enough evidence to conclude that it caused a drop. Turnout did decline from 2018 to 2022, but that drop was of a similar scale to historical variation in Alaska’s midterm elections. And meanwhile, the rest of the country, which did not use ranked choice voting for the first time in 2022, saw a similar-size turnout drop over the same period. If ranked choice voting were the culprit, I would expect Alaska to have seen a larger drop in turnout than other states saw.
Comparing individual offices, parties, and regions doesn’t give any evidence either. Every party and region was subject to the same ranked choice voting rules, so variation there doesn’t tell us anything. And while turnout was higher in ranked choice candidate races (federal positions, state executives, and the state legislature) than in non-ranked candidate races (judicial retention contests), the main factor in that discrepancy is likely that judicial races are generally low-profile contests that don’t attract a lot of voter interest.
While implementing ranked choice voting is one reason that turnout could have changed, there are many other factors that may have affected voter participation. One is voter fatigue. Since the special US House election was conducted just a few months earlier (and the political dynamics of the regular election were a rerun between the same major candidates), potential voters may have lost interest and tuned out. Another is candidates’ behavior, with the disparaging comments some candidates made about the new election system potentially encouraging voters to stay home. And after the all-mail special primary held earlier that year, some voters may have expected to receive a ballot in the mail for the general election and didn’t make a backup plan to go to their polling place.
With only a small change in turnout and other confounding factors, it will take more than one election to determine how ranked choice voting will affect Alaska’s voter turnout patterns. Academic research hasn’t come to a consensus on the turnout effects of ranked choice voting in the other places it’s been implemented, though some more recent studies, which raise issues with the methodology of previous reports, identify a slight increase in turnout in jurisdictions using ranked choice voting.
Researchers like me are eagerly awaiting the second ranked choice election in Alaska, which will be conducted this November. That still won’t be enough to assess the long-term impact on voter turnout—but hey, two data points are twice as good as just one!
