I looked at the results, Lela, and all seems fine, but you make some good points indeed.
Voters were inclined to vote for a Republican candidate overall, but those picking Begich with Peltola as their second choice, give her the win.
I am certain that if all had wanted Palin as second choice, they would have picked her.
However, we cannot second guess Begich voters that left their second option open other than following his 'advice'.
One of the options in RCV is indeed to leave additional votes empty, so one is not forced to put a candidate in second or third position. Some 11,000 Begich voters did that, hopefully not because they were confused.
What I saw was that a negligible number of people had ranked two candidates both as 2nd (or as 3rd) invalidating their second choice. But that was less than 100 people. So, yes, there was confusion, but that confusion we see occurred in the very low numbers.
Lastly (before showing just a little more on this election right below), one can say that enough Begich voters did not want Palin as their first choice. As such, we can see her as a choice that not every Republican would embrace. That is not to say that leaving the second choice open was all clear to everyone, but we can say that Palin was not everyone's choice and that can explain the Democrat getting 2nd choice positions by enough Begich voters.
There is something else important about this election:
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A total of 188,462 votes were cast for all three preferred number 1 candidates.
The US Census says there are 733,391 people in Alaska, and that 24.5% is younger than 18 years.
That means that 553,710 adults live in Alaska.
That means if we accept this as the numbers to play with that 34.04% of all adults came out to vote.
That would have been my headline, Lela. That incredibly low number of voters coming out to vote.
Not enough people care enough to come out to vote in Alaska. They don't care who won. So, that takes away some of the Republican zeal, or even the zeal of our being a democracy. The voter turnout is just extremely low.
It is a special election, and folks may be tired of going to the voting booth all the time, I understand. But it was important enough for these candidates to give their very best.
That would have been my headline: Low voter turnout decides election (which is nothing new). Even with Ranked Choice Voting, voters did not come out in droves.
Meanwhile, proportional voting propels people to come out in droves. Voter turnouts of 80% are not uncommon in nations with proportional voting. Their democracies are alive; ours is in the doldrums.
