Sightline Institute Research

Fewer hardliners won office, leading to an overwhelmingly bipartisan Senate majority, a hard-fought win on education funding, and the ability to neutralize culture warriors.

The debut in Alaska of nonpartisan open primaries and ranked choice general elections in 2022 promised to reduce polarization in government by rewarding lawmakers who prioritize solving problems over partisan gamesmanship. The system likely did not change the outcome in a majority of races, but did appear to make a difference in a few.

A handful of moderate Republican state legislators who most likely would have lost in the previous semi-closed primary system defeated more conservative candidates. The moderates appealed to a broader base of voters in their districts while the conservatives targeted a more partisan subset. In 2022, 59 of 60 legislators won in the system of open primaries and ranked choice general elections.

Two legislative sessions have passed since then. Has Juneau shown any signs of increased pragmatism? Are legislators more disposed to govern in ways that accurately reflect the views of Alaska's moderate Republican electorate? These questions are timely given that several states, including Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, DC, are considering similar changes to their voting systems.

Interviews with more than a dozen state legislators, political reporters, and longtime political watchers yielded little agreement on how exactly the election system affected lawmaking in Juneau. There was consensus, however, on the following:

The bipartisan majority in the Senate was larger than it otherwise would have been.

A larger number of Republican lawmakers were willing to override the conservative governor's widely unpopular veto of education funding in March.

Polarizing politicians on the right still won in the handful of districts where voters support them but were unable to effectively open the gates to a full-blown culture war.

Now for the caveats:

We don't have much data to go on. Alaska has had only one election using open primaries and ranked choice general elections.

Lawmakers respond to a world of stakeholders, fiscal realities, events, and other factors unrelated to whatever election system is in play.

The counterfactual (how legislators would have behaved had they been elected under Alaska's previous election system) is also unknowable.

The new election system wasn't the only big change in 2022. The decennial redrawing of Alaska's legislative districts changed the voter constituencies of sitting legislators and brought a large class of freshman lawmakers to the state capitol. These less-experienced lawmakers may not have legislated according to the bipartisan incentives introduced by the election system.

A quick explainer of Alaska's election system

In the 2022 midterms, Alaskans chose their lawmakers using a combination of open primaries and ranked choice general elections. Two years prior, Alaska voters had jettisoned the previous system of semi-closed primaries and plurality general elections, which allow candidates to win with less than a majority of votes. Alaska's current open primaries and ranked choice general elections system applies to the races for US House, US Senate, governor, and state legislature. Alaska's Republican and Democratic parties still control the presidential primaries, but Alaska uses ranked choice voting in the general election to determine which candidate receives the state's three electoral votes.

In the primaries, voters choose one favorite from a list of all the candidates. The top four candidates in each race, regardless of party affiliation, advance to the ranked choice general election. Party registration information for each candidate appears on both the primary and general election ballots. And the new system does not prevent parties or other groups from endorsing candidates.

In general election races with three or more candidates, voters rank the contenders from most to least favorit...

Four ways the initiative could affect Washington.

Burning gas to heat homes, generate electricity, and power industry bears responsibility for about a quarter of Washington's climate pollution. Washington State - and its cities-have enacted a suite of laws to help homes and businesses make the transition from gas to all-electric appliances such as heat pumps. Initiative Measure No. 2066 on Washington's November 2024 ballot would directly repeal some of the state's gas transition policies and could impact others.

Below we explain four policies and regulations in Washington that the initiative could impact.

1. Washington's 2021 Energy Code

Initiative 2066 reverses a requirement that Washington's energy code work toward emissions-free new construction by 2031 and prohibits the energy code from limiting gas in buildings. This change could affect Washington's latest energy code, which incentivizes electric heat pumps over gas appliances in new buildings.

Buildings make up a quarter of Washington's carbon emissions, polluting more than any other sector except transportation. Almost half of that pollution comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly gas, for space and water heating.

Fifteen years ago, Washington legislators recognized that constructing more and more buildings that burn fossil fuels would catapult the state's carbon pollution problem from bad to worse. In 2009 policymakers passed Senate Bill 5854, establishing new requirements for the state's energy code, which regulates the design and construction of new buildings. The law mandated that the energy code help achieve a statewide goal of constructing emissions-free homes and buildings by 2031.

In 2024 Washington's State Building Code Council (SBCC) finalized the state's latest residential and commercial energy code. In its initial draft of the 2021 code, SBCC required electric heat pumps in all new commercial and residential buildings. However, after the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned Berkeley, Califonia's prohibition on gas hookups in new buildings, SBCC voluntarily revised its draft code to bolster it against potential lawsuits from the gas industry.

Washington's final 2021 energy code does not require heat pumps or ban gas hookups, but it strongly incentivizes electric heat pumps. If builders choose to install a gas furnace or boiler, they will need to compensate with a slew of other (likely more expensive) efficiency measures. It's worth noting that building new all-electric homes is cheaper than building new homes that use both gas and electricity. Further, heat pumps can reduce people's energy bills and are a cooling solution as well as a heating one. Today nearly half of Washington homes lack air conditioning.

Initiative 2066 would repeal the state's longstanding requirement that the energy code work toward emissions-free new construction by 2031, and it would bar the code from "prohibiting, penalizing, or discouraging" gas appliances in buildings. This new prohibition might be used to challenge the 2021 energy code for incentivizing electric heat pumps over gas appliances.

Initiative 2066 strike-through: "The Washington state energy code shall be designed to: Construct increasingly energy efficient homes and buildings that help achieve the broader goal of building zero fossil-fuel greenhouse gas emission homes and buildings by the year 2031." Initiative 2066 addition: "The Washington state energy code may not in any way prohibit, penalize, or discourage the use of gas for any form of heating, or for uses related to any appliance or equipment, in any building."

2. Seattle's 2023 Building Emissions Performance Standard

Initiative 2066 prohibits cities and towns from actions that "prohibit, penalize, or discourage" the use of gas in buildings. This could affect Seattle's new Building Emissions Performance Standard, which requires large buildings to reach net zero emissions by 2050 - a goal that's difficult to achieve without transitio...

A secret, nonpartisan chance to better inform voters.

Consider the humble Voters' Guide: an official booklet that lets candidates and campaigns state their cases. Those of us who live in Voters' Guide states take them for granted, filling in our ballots with the pamphlet open beside us, indispensable companions. An easy way to upgrade democracy would be to replicate Voters' Guides across Cascadia and beyond. Such pamphlets are ubiquitous in coastal Cascadia (with one exception - more on that below) but rare inland.

We Cascadians in Oregon and Washington - we who have voted by mail for so long that going to a polling place is mostly just a story told by elders - take such guides for granted. They arrive from elections offices shortly before our ballots do, lining mailboxes with comforting newsprint pages filled with headshots, candidate pitches, and arguments for and against ballot measures. They also compile other useful information, such as deadlines, locations, schedules, and services for those with disabilities or language barriers. Many localities offer guides in languages other than English, and Washington's state nonpartisan TV station even produces a video version.

The same goes for Cascadians who live on the southern periphery of the region on California's redwood coast: voters' guides are a given. Just so, Cascadians in the region's northernmost reaches benefit from Alaska's Official Election Pamphlet, which describes ballot issues and provides candidate statements.

The singularity of this practice is easy to forget. On TikTok, one newcomer to Washington from Oklahoma expressed bewildered delight at the discovery, "They mail you a pamphlet . . . with everyone's stances on everything so you don't have to do research?!?! That's not true! That can't be true!" Oh yes, it is.

Away from the Pacific, and long before you get to Oklahoma, though, voters' guides thin out. Montana's Voter Information Pamphlet excludes candidate races entirely, though it does provide pro and con arguments for state ballot measures (an example). In Idaho and Wyoming, official voters' guides don't even do that. They exclude candidate statements and pro/con statements. In Wyoming, they don't even include the text of the measures.

What explains this pattern? Is it just a blue-red split, with coastal blues happier to pay to inform voters while Rocky Mountain reds save their money? Maybe, but red-state Alaska doesn't fit that pattern. It votes conservative but mails a comprehensive voters' guide to every home in the state, like its coastal cousins to the south. And brick-red Utah, cozied up beside Idaho and Wyoming, publishes a comprehensive voters' pamphlet, though it distributes it mostly online rather than through the mail.

The difference is likely just a fluke of history. That's why it's heartening that Idaho's conservative Secretary of State has repeatedly sponsored legislation for a comprehensive voters' guide in the Gem State. Let's hope the state legislature stops demurring and approves the plan.

P.S. The exception

Oh, then there's the big outlier, the coastal exception which I referred to above: the province of British Columbia. ElectionsBC publishes no voters' pamphlet at all. No candidate information. Nothing on ballot measures. Only generic information on the mechanics of voting.

Is British Columbia, famously the most liberal jurisdiction in Cascadia, a Wyoming-like conservative about paying to inform voters? Not really.

The province's entire election system is so completely different than that in the US parts of Cascadia that voters' pamphlets are less needed. In the province's high-stakes October 19 election, voters' ballots will offer only one single race: the choice of a local representative to the legislative assembly in Victoria. While US Cascadian voters fill in a dozen or more bubbles for different national, state, and local races, British Columbians will fill in just one. In practice, they'll vote for whichever party they want t...

The state's groundbreaking statewide use of ranked choice voting is a positive model.

Ranked choice voting will be on the ballot in Oregon this fall. And because the proposed measure won't alter Oregon's partisan primaries, it is not the same as Alaska's much-discussed electoral system, which combines ranked choice general elections with unified all-party, top-four primaries. It's also unlike proposals before voters this fall in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Nevada, which emulate Alaska's system.

Instead, Maine, the first state to adopt ranked choice voting statewide, offers Oregonians the closest example of what the changes might look like in practice. Like Oregon, Maine has mostly closed partisan primaries and kept them after implementing ranked choice voting.

Cascadians, therefore, may want to know: How has ranked choice voting influenced elections in Maine?

In short, Maine's groundbreaking use of ranked choice voting showcases similar advantages to what we've seen elsewhere, before and since the Pine Tree State's journey with the voting method began. Ranked choice voting is popular and well-liked, especially after people use it. Candidates sometimes campaign together or reach out to each other's supporters. And because elected leaders must earn majority support, they have strong incentives to seek votes beyond their party base.

Mainers express enthusiasm for ranked choice voting across multiple elections

Mainers like ranked choice voting. They voted to affirm its use not once but twice, and polls confirm continued voter enthusiasm.

Maine has used ranked choice voting statewide since 2018, and its largest city, Portland, has used it since 2011. The election of Paul LePage, Maine's controversial former governor, was a major spur for reform. LePage served two terms but never won a majority of votes; in 2010, for example, he won with less than 38 percent of the vote.

After LePage, many Mainers wanted a system that would never again elect outlier officeholders supported only by pluralities of voters. Still, winning reform was not easy.

Voters in Maine adopted ranked choice voting in 2016 through a citizens' petition and ballot measure. Ranked choice voting was set to start in the 2018 elections; however, in 2017, following inquiries from the Maine Senate, the state supreme court advised that ranked choice voting was unconstitutional in some general elections because the Maine constitution stipulates that state offices be won with a plurality (whoever receives the most votes). In response, the state legislature passed a bill to delay implementation of all uses of ranked choice voting until the constitution could be changed - a move many saw as repealing ranked choice voting in opposition to the people's will.

Volunteers collected signatures for a "people's veto" of the legislature's delay. With the law on hold until the veto measure was voted on, the courts directed the secretary of state to move forward in implementing ranked choice voting in the June 2018 primaries. In the same June election where they used ranked choice voting for the first time, Maine voters again voiced their support at the ballot for the voting method, passing the veto measure.

Further controversy followed Maine's use of ranked choice voting in the 2018 general election (more on this below) and again when the Maine Republican Party sought to reduce the use of the voting method after the state legislature expanded it to apply to presidential contests. But ranked choice voting remains in action.

Because the constitutional quirk that requires plurality general election winners applies to state offices, Maine uses ranked choice voting in only the partisan primaries for governor, state senator, and state representative, and in both primaries and general elections for US senator, US representative, and now US president.

Ranked ballots offer small but mighty improvements for voters

Election reform has not dramatically shifted Maine's politics. Maine's election...

Mitigating spoiler candidates and other upsides for Beaver State elections.

Author's note:

In early 2023, I wrote about Oregon House Bill 2004, which let voters decide whether to adopt ranked choice voting in statewide elections, including those for president, US House and Senate, and governor. If adopted, it would also give cities, school districts, and other local entities in Oregon guidelines to adopt ranked choice voting in their elections. The legislature passed the bill in June 2023, putting it to voters to approve or reject this fall as Measure 117. Today, by way of offering an explainer on what a switch to ranked choice voting looks like for Oregon voters, I'm re-sharing my 2023 research on the substance of that bill, including four ways evidence shows ranked choice voting gives voters more voice and more choices in elections. I've made a few minor updates to reflect the measure on the ballot in Oregon this November.

How ranked choice voting works

Ranked choice voting would make some key changes to Oregon's current pick-one voting system, particularly in contests where voters have more than two candidates to choose from (as they do in almost every state election). Using ranked choice voting, Oregon voters would no longer be limited to selecting a single candidate (though they could choose just one if they wanted to). Instead, voters would be free to rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first preferences, ballots go to further rounds of counting where last-place candidates are eliminated and their voters' later choices are considered, continuing until one candidate has over 50 percent of the vote among the remaining candidates. Here are four reasons voters tend to like the option to rank candidates on their ballots:

1. Winners earn stronger bases of support

Pick-one elections often work fine for elections with just two candidates in the running: voters select their favorite, and the person with more votes wins. But things get tricky when voters have three or more candidates to choose from. Maybe only 40 percent of voters cast their ballots for the winner, while two contending candidates each receive 30 percent - so the winner has less than majority support. Or maybe there are ten candidates, and the winner comes out with support from only 15 or 20 percent of voters - quite the minority! When the top candidate has a plurality (the most votes) but not a majority (more than half of the votes), more voters voted against the winner than for them.

This situation happens all the time in Oregon. Of the seven gubernatorial elections since 2000, four saw the winning candidate finish with less than 50 percent of the vote. In 2022, with high-profile nonpartisan candidate Betsy Johnson drawing nine percent of the vote, Tina Kotek won the race for Governor with only 47 percent of voters supporting her.

It's even worse in primary elections. Oregon's Republican primaries for governor since 2000 usually saw nine or ten candidates, and in only one of those races did a winner receive a majority of the vote. 2022 was a particularly extreme example of this, with 19 candidates running; Christine Drazan came out on top but garnered only 23 percent of the vote. But say those other 77 percent of voters really didn't like Drazan, and voters would have jointly preferred another candidate even if their first choice lost. Those 18 other candidates split the anti-Drazan vote, and the Drazan supporters, a small minority overall, got to pick their favorite, overriding the majority.

Ranked choice voting would help that majority coalesce around a single candidate, mitigating vote splitting among multiple similar options. Since Drazan wouldn't be immediately elected in the first round of counting, later rounds might show that a stronger candidate had the support of more voters. Or they could show that other voters did support Drazan, giving her a clearer base of support heading into the general elect...

Oregon laws can catch up to protect customers.

Customers in southeast Portland recently found out that hydrogen may be sneaking its way into their homes. NW Natural, Oregon's largest gas utility, has started injecting hydrogen, blended with so-called "natural gas," into its distribution lines without informing customers or regulators.

Hydrogen is a bad bet for decarbonizing homes pretty much any way you look at it. It's far more expensive than electrification, can't achieve nearly the same climate impact, and can be dangerous, as Sightline has written about extensively. Plus, since carbon-free green hydrogen is in short supply and is electricity-intensive to produce, policymakers would be smart to save it for the hardest-to-decarbonize sectors, like heavy industry.

But gas utilities across Cascadia are pushing hydrogen for use in homes and businesses, and lawmakers and regulators have yet to catch up. Oregon, home to Cascadia's first hydrogen-blending pilot, has no laws to protect consumers and communities from ineffective, unsafe, and inefficient use of the fuel.

And Oregon is not alone in the region; Alaska, Idaho, and Montana all lack legal oversight of hydrogen blending, although no projects of this type are yet underway in these states. (British Columbia statute permits gas utilities to replace some of its natural gas with hydrogen, subject to price and quantity caps.) Washington State is the only jurisdiction in Cascadia with some safeguards for consumers, communities, and the electric grid around utilities' use of hydrogen. Policymakers in Oregon and Cascadia writ large can build from Washington's policy to protect customers and ensure that gas utilities aren't throwing good money after bad.

Cascadia's first hydrogen blending project is underway

All Cascadian gas utilities promote hydrogen as a pivotal part of their decarbonization plans. Hydrogen and biomethane feature prominently in NW Natural's 2022 integrated resource plan (IRP). Oregon regulators recently rejected this plan, partly because its long-range assumptions about hydrogen "skew optimistic" and do not present an "objective view of the significant risks and uncertainties" of the fuel. In fact, the Oregon Public Utilities Commission (PUC) rejected all three of the state's gas utilities' plans to decarbonize with hydrogen due in part to high cost and overly optimistic forecasts for growth of a hydrogen economy.

But this regulatory setback didn't stop NW Natural from moving ahead with the fuel. "Hydrogen is a key piece of our plan to reach our goal of delivering carbon neutral energy by 2050," NW Natural boasts on its website. In May 2024, the utility started delivering hydrogen to homes and businesses in the Portland area without formal notice to regulators or customers. The pilot is displacing just 0.2 percent of summer gas volumes and 0.003 percent of winter gas volumes.

Cascadia's gas utilities have promoted so-called green hydrogen, made from renewable electricity-powered electrolyzers that split water into hydrogen and oxygen. (See Sightline's primer on the different types of hydrogen.) But NW Natural isn't even piloting green hydrogen; it is blending turquoise hydrogen into its system, which it produces at its Central Portland facility. To create turquoise hydrogen, natural gas is heated to high temperatures and converted to hydrogen and solid carbon - a process known as pyrolysis. Climate-warming pollution is emitted throughout the process: methane leaks during fracking and delivery, and fossil fuels may be burned to generate heat for pyrolysis.

Even if NW Natural were using green hydrogen, its pilot would skim less than 0.07 percent of carbon emissions from NW Natural's gas system. And if NW Natural scales its hydrogen operations to displace 20 percent of its gas blend (a hundredfold increase from the pilot and the maximum possible blend amount in existing pipelines), it would still reduce its carbon emissions by at most 7 percent.

Oregon lawmakers ...

Up to 40 percent of the region's grid could be suitable for reconductoring - for less than half the time and cost of building new transmission lines.

The lights could soon dim on the Northwest's climate goals unless the grid gets some serious TLC.

The region, like the United States as a whole, needs more electric transmission capacity to reach the best wind and solar resources and meet rising power demand without burning coal or gas. But building new transmission lines can take decades and cost billions. Luckily there are no-brainer ways to squeeze more juice out of the existing grid.

Among the options, reconductoring - swapping out the wires on transmission lines for higher capacity ones - holds particular promise for its relative speed to deployment, capacity potential, and cost. Reconductoring can more than double a line's capacity, costs less than half the price of building a brand-new line, and can take just 18 to 36 months to implement.

In the Northwest, up to 23,000 miles of transmission lines (about 40 percent of the region's grid) could be suitable for reconductoring. To get more wire upgrade projects off the ground, policymakers can improve utility planning processes, fast-track permitting, and introduce performance incentives. With most of the region's grid strung up with wires invented more than 100 years ago, a grid glow-up is long overdue.

Reconductoring can double transmission lines' capacity for less than half the cost of building new lines

Why should people who care about climate change pay attention to wires? Here's a quick primer: In sum, the type of wire - conductor - on a transmission line affects how much power it can carry, how much electricity it wastes, and how much it sags. (Sagging lines can spark wildfires.) Swapping out old wires with the latest and greatest technology is far cheaper, faster, and easier than building whole new transmission lines.

For more than 100 years, transmission owners have strung up the same type of wire. Aluminum conductor steel reinforced (ACSR), as it is known, remains the default conductor for most transmission projects in the United States.

In the Northwest, nearly all investor-owned utilities' transmission lines are outfitted with ACSR. (Bonneville Power Administration [BPA], which owns and operates most of the region's high-voltage transmission system, does not provide detailed data about conductor type. However, the vast majority of its lines use ACSR, according to a BPA representative.)

In the 1970s, the industry introduced a new type of conductor known as aluminum conductor steel supported (ACSS). ACSS conductors nearly double the capacity of their ACSR counterparts, but they come with a big downside: excessive sagging at high temperatures. Sag is a particular concern in wildfire-prone areas like the Northwest. Reconductoring with ACSS conductors can require raising structures or placing more towers closer together to meet minimum clearance standards, which increases project costs.

In the 2000s, newer, more advanced conductors entered the market, which traded out the traditional steel core for a smaller composite of glass, ceramic, or carbon fibers. This new lighter core allowed more aluminum (which conducts electricity) to fit on a wire of equal diameter, making it possible to operate the line at a higher temperature. Higher operating temperatures increase a line's thermal limit - one of three possible limits to transmission lines' capacity.

The most promising and widely deployed composite-core conductor is known as aluminum conductor composite core (ACCC). (ACSS trapezoidal wire [ACSS/TW], a more advanced ACSS model, was also introduced in the 2000s.)

Here's an analogy to explain this that will make sense to anyone born before the 2000s, at least: If ACSR conductors are dial-up internet, ACCC conductors are 5G. ACCC conductors double the capacity of ACSR models. They don't sag at high temperatures, and they're the most efficient conductors on the market, meanin...

Three hometown stories show why parking reform is for everyone.

Earlier this spring, when Port Townsend, Washington, eliminated parking mandates - predetermined numbers of parking spaces required by law for new buildings - the news took the internet by surprise. Not many people expected the first Washington city to make off-street parking fully optional would be a small town of 10,000 residents.

"Seattle getting lapped by…Port Townsend," The Urbanist wrote. Another commenter wrote, "Port Townsend punches well above its weight in a few ways." Even my own colleague Dan remarked on the news, "The politics around abolishing parking mandates is bizarre."

But it's not surprising that towns of Port Townsend's size are leading the way. While large cities like San Jose, California, and Austin, Texas, garner national press coverage for eliminating parking mandates, this policy reform is most commonly enacted in towns with fewer than 25,000 residents.

According to the Parking Reform Network's mandates map, for every large American city (with a population of 250,000 or more) that has fully repealed parking mandates, there are two small towns (fewer than 25,000 people) that have done the same.

To be clear, there are far more tiny towns in the United States than big cities. But small jurisdictions are also likely underrepresented in the Parking Reform Network data. With little to no media coverage of zoning changes in places like Gilman, Wisconsin, or Canandaigua, New York, those parking reforms are less likely to make it onto the map in the first place. The database also fails to acknowledge the multitude of rural communities and small towns that never adopted parking mandates in the first place - or any zoning codes at all - and still manage to get along just fine. My hometown in northern Maine is one of them.

Overall, places with 25,000 or fewer residents make up 40 percent of known jurisdictions in the United States that have returned decisions about parking back to the people who live and work there. Below are just a handful of stories from these communities about why they removed parking minimums and what has happened since.

A town charts an economic revival

Ecorse, Michigan, was already scheduled to update its local zoning code in 2020, when United States Steel, the town's largest employer, announced it would be shutting down most of its operations. The news prompted the city to completely overhaul its zoning, including eliminating parking mandates.

"We didn't really get any pushback against the reduction of parking minimums,"

said planner Nani Wolf.

"We have way more parking than we need, and I think everybody was generally in recognition of that."

The main form of development in Ecorse is renovations of existing buildings. Unfortunately, there are a number of vacant properties. Since its peak in the 1970s, the town has lost almost half its population, now at 9,800 residents.

"Having those parking minimums removed has made it so much easier and quicker for people to reoccupy those buildings,"

said Wolf. She pointed to one example of a former ice cream shop that someone wanted to turn into a Puerto Rican restaurant. The owner's biggest concern was parking: there were only two spaces on the property. In past years, that would have posed a regulatory problem, but Wolf reassured the owner that he was good to go.

In other cases, the city introduced prospective entrepreneurs to nearby businesses that might be amenable to a parking lot sharing agreement.

"We really need to focus on redistributing what already exists, not requiring people to build more,"

said Wolf.

As Ecorse charts a new future, the reduced red tape has made it easier for people to invest in their community.

"Speed of development review is so much faster,"

said Wolf.

"That's true for developers and for city staff. Parking just takes so much time and energy from everybody involved."

Protecting rural land

The town of Chattahoochee Hills incorporated in 2007 with the aim of...

How a democracy data analyst assesses changes in voter turnout.

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, 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. 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 l...

Reporters can help people see the forest, even when the trees are on fire.

News is news. And fire is fire. But coverage of wildfires in 2024 is more than a matter of acres burned, percentage contained, drought and wind conditions, evacuation orders, and threats to lives and property. All that is important, but it's not the full story. Journalists play a vital role in interpreting the significance of wildfire events within a broader context. For example, over the past decade, following the available science, reporters have shifted from covering wildfires simply as natural disasters and zeroing in only on a singular "cause" or spark. They are more often clarifying how wildfires are climate-boosted natural disasters, with global warming as one major factor creating conditions for more severe fires that are more difficult to fight.

As science, conditions, and understanding evolves, it's time to go further. As megafires burn across the west and firefighters put their lives on the line over and over, the news media have an important role to play, highlighting other human-caused factors that exacerbate the wildfire crisis---namely policies that put people and property in harm's way by encouraging building houses in wildfire-prone areas, lack of information and mandates for fire hardening, and a default tendency to frame all wildfire as simply "bad," overlooking the use "beneficial" fire as an effective prevention measure.

Here are four ways that journalists can tell the full story of wildfires.

#1: Reframe wildfires as natural

Although wildfires can bring tragic destruction, at the same time, it's crucial to understand that wildfires and human-started fires have burned regularly throughout the West for thousands of years and that fire has benefits in ecosystem health and in preventing the largest and most severe fires. In places with high summer temperatures, low humidity, and little rain, the natural "fire return interval" can be just 10 to 15 years before another fire comes through, clearing out the debris that would otherwise accumulate into highly flammable kindling and reinvigorating "fire-adapted" ecosystems where fire is needed to activate seeds and clear openings where wildlife can then browse on young tree shoots and ground-level shrubs.

Indigenous people have relied on intentional burns to cultivate food, fiber, and forage and to mitigate big destructive fires. Settler-colonial history of putting out all fires has left a legacy of choked forests where wildlife suffers, and the accumulation of forest fuels turns what could be small fires into megafires.

Now the United States and Canada are transitioning away from full suppression and trying to return a more natural regime of beneficial fire. Their success depends in part on a cultural redefinition of wildfires as a natural occurrence.

Journalists play an important role in redefining wildfires. While wildfire coverage is often necessarily focused on people and property destruction, reporters can begin to recast fires as a natural part of western landscapes. For example, when covering a fire, journalists can:

Mention the area's natural fire return interval by referencing a map or noting the area's level of wildfire hazard. (This is also shown on maps.) Showcasing physical evidence, such as a photograph of fire scars on a cross-section of tree growth rings, is also effective. This sets the expectation of fire as a natural occurrence with an important role in preventing the accumulation of fuel.

Show that fire is baked into ecosystem life by referencing local species that are fire-dependent or fire-adapted. Journalists can identify such species with the help of the US Forest Service, US Bureau of Land Management, or state department of natural resources.

Describe wildfire in neutral terms instead of alarming and negative ones. For example, use "large and high-intensity wildfires" or just "wildfires" instead of "raging" or "devastating wildfires."

Measure damage in terms of co...