Conservative election-integrity advocates are celebrating electoral victories against ballot measures to reconfigure statewide elections. They also ranked up wins in the fight to make elections more secure.
Voters rejected multiple ballot measures that would have enacted ranked-choice voting and open party-primary systems, some of which paired the two together. In Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and South Dakota those efforts failed. Missouri also voted to prohibit ranked choice voting altogether, paired with an amendment on citizenship requirements for voting.
“First, voters overwhelmingly believe that only American citizens should vote in American elections. That was the result in eight states, with support ranging from 62 percent to 86 percent. The second theme is that voters do not want ranked-choice voting or to kick parties out of primary elections,” said conservative activist Trent England, a proponent of the Electoral College and a leading opponent of ranked-choice voting.
“This is a major loss for the far-left, dark-money machine that pumped millions of dollars into these ballot campaigns and came up empty-handed. Voters don’t want these out-of-state elites manipulating their election rules and state constitutions.”
Alaska repealed its ranked-choice voting system four years after enacting it following sustained criticism from conservatives that it helped Democratic Representative Mary Peltola win the state’s at-large district in 2022. Peltola is currently losing to Republican challenger Nick Begich, with three-fourths of Alaska’s votes counted.
“Alaska repealed ranked-choice voting after using it just one time. Voters across the country overwhelmingly defeated ranked-choice voting ballot measures, and in Missouri, they voted decisively to ban it once and for all. Liberal billionaires thought they could buy a new form of democracy that would cater to them, but the American people said no,” said Honest Elections Project Action executive director Jason Snead.
Another major victory for Republicans came in Ohio, where a ballot measure to create an independent redistricting body failed, despite a well-funded progressive activist campaign promoting it. Ohio voted 53.9 percent to 46.1 percent against Issue One to establish the citizens redistricting commission, a margin greater than that of Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno in his victory over three-term Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown.
The redistricting process could have allowed Democrats to gain multiple congressional seats in future elections, potentially altering the makeup of the hotly contested chamber. President-elect Donald Trump, Ohio GOP congressional lawmakers, and the state’s Republican leadership uniformly opposed Issue One.
“And last but not least, Issue One failed in Ohio even after outspending the ‘no’ campaign by tens of millions of dollars, much of which was tied to a foreign billionaire,” Snead added.
“These victories should send a signal to state and federal lawmakers that the American people support commonsense election-integrity policies. Legislators should act accordingly when they return to Congress and their state capitals in January.”
Furthermore, the electorate broadly supported ballot measures strengthening citizenship requirements to vote, and Nevada voters decisively chose to increase voter-ID requirements, a position Democrats strongly oppose despite strong public support for it.
In Iowa, Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin, all states that President-elect Donald Trump won, voters overwhelmingly said yes to citizenship requirements for voters, as Republicans expressed fear of the possibility of illegal immigrants casting ballots.
The margin in Wisconsin, roughly 66 percent to 34 percent, was noticeably larger than Trump’s narrow victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the toss-up state, suggesting that a portion of Democratic voters backed the citizenship amendment. Some of the red states where Trump won easily voted even more emphatically for the citizenship requirements to be added to their state constitutions.