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By Giulia Carbonaro
Senior Reporter
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Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins passed the threshold to avoid a ranked-choice voting runoff with the latest ballot count, pulling ahead of three Republicans with 50.2 percent of the total vote.
With 88 percent of votes counted as of Friday early morning, Bernadette M. Wilson, a television and radio host, trailed the former state representative with 28.7 percent of the vote, followed by Dave Bronson and Treg Taylor with 13.8 percent and 7.3 percent.
In 2020, a majority of voters in Alaska chose to adopt ranked-choice voting and an open primary system, which allows multiple candidates from the same party to advance to the general election. This is why there were four candidates on the ballot on November 3.
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Kreiss-Tomkins, who had obtained 23 percent of the vote in the 17-candidate primary, was left as the only Democrat on the ballot after former state Sen. Tom Begich, who had placed second with about 21 percent of the vote, withdrew to avoid splitting the vote. Kreiss-Tomkins was left to face three Republican candidates who had obtained only between 10 and 7 percent of the vote in the primary.
Under Alaska’s ranked-choice voting, if a candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, they win outright.
If nobody gets over that threshold, the last-place candidate is eliminated and ballots cast for that candidate are transferred to voters’ next choices, their second-ranked candidate. The process continues until one candidate has a majority.
If Kreiss-Tomkins remains above 50 percent, the ranked-choice voting system will not be triggered and the results should be announced without tabulation or ranked choices. But more votes remain to be counted.
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This is a developing story and will be updated.
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