Progressive group gears up for battle to fight repeal of ranked-choice voting in Alaska

A building political campaign appears to be taking shape ahead of Alaska’s 2026 election, as the Ship Creek Group now is advertising for a campaign manager whose sole mission is to defend Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system from repeal.

The job posting lays out a comprehensive statewide ballot campaign to “defend the state’s campaign finance, open primaries, and ranked-choice voting system from repeal.” The position would oversee staff, consultants, confirm messaging, manage legal and compliance efforts, and build what the posting repeatedly describes as a “cross-partisan coalition” capable of winning a high-stakes ballot fight.

The urgency behind the hiring stems from a successful signature-gathering effort by Repeal Now, the organized opponents of Alaska’s unconventional voting system. Repeal Now has collected enough signatures to place a repeal measure on the 2026 ballot, aiming to undo the 2020 initiative that narrowly passed and fundamentally changed how Alaskans nominate and elect candidates. If approved by voters, the repeal would end the open primary and ranked-choice voting framework that has been in place for the past two election cycles. The effort in 2024 to repeal the voting scheme failed by less than 700 votes.

The Ship Creek Group’s job description claims the Alaska system is a national model, argues it promotes pragmatism over extremism, and that it rewards candidates with broad appeal rather than narrow partisan support.

The posting links to favorable coverage from organizations such as the Sightline Institute, PBS News, and the Harvard Journal on Legislation, and references cross-party endorsements between Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Rep. Mary Peltola as evidence of the system’s impact.

The job description falsely says that ranked-choice voting has led to less partisanship and gridlock in Alaska. In actuality, there is possibly no state with more gridlock than Alaska, due to ranked-choice voting putting just enough moderates in office to create Democrat-led coalitions.

“The effect of the Alaska system – pragmatism over extremism, broad appeal rather than narrow partisan interests, and cross-partisan collaboration – has been a widely touted antidote to the path of divisiveness and polarization that has gripped the lower-48,” the Ship Creek Group says.

Besides the falsehoods about a more kumbaya political atmosphere in Alaska, what stands out is not just the scope of the proposed campaign, but the apparent absence of activity from Alaskans for Better Elections, the group that originally bankrolled and promoted the 2022 ballot initiative that brought ranked-choice voting and open primaries to Alaska. Since repeal advocates qualified their measure for the ballot, Alaskans for Better Elections has remained largely silent.

But it shares the same address as the Ship Creek Group, so there’s that. It’s essentially one and the same.

The campaign manager role to block repeal would report to a general consultant and executive committee and would be responsible for hiring a full campaign staff, including a deputy campaign manager, organizing director, and communications director. Roughly half of the position’s time would be spent managing staff and project execution, with the remainder divided between coalition building and messaging strategy. Thus, Ship Creek Group is expecting big money to flow its way from Outside the state, just like what happened during the last repeal attempt, when the repealers were outspent drastically.

The current job description calls for coordinating legal strategy, communications, field operations, data, and even “signature-blocking strategies,” all elements typical of a major ballot-initiative defense effort and all requiring paid staff and a legal team.

And Ship Creek is also aiming to try to fool conservatives. The posting emphasizes outreach to conservative validators, influencers, Alaska Native communities, labor, and industry, as the coalition it needs to retain the voting system installed by Outside dark money in 2022.