By james art 
By Nathan Duell | Arizona State Director, Heritage Action for America
The last thing Arizona needs is a confusing, complicated California-style election scheme that could disenfranchise voters. Proposition 140 would bring to Arizona some of the worst components of California’s election system, such as jungle primaries and ranked-choice voting.
Jungle primaries and ranked-choice voting create an incredibly confusing and opaque process that is prone to error. Two months into California’s 2022 school board elections using ranked-choice voting, it was finally discovered that votes had been misordered and the wrong candidate had been certified as the winner.
Ranked voting also disenfranchises voters. It forces voters to rank and vote for candidates they do not support to ensure that their ballot is not thrown out in the multiple rounds of vote counting.
New York City used ranked-choice voting for its 2021 mayoral race, and it took eight rounds of counting to declare a winner. More than 140,000 voters were effectively disenfranchised due to “ballot exhaustion” because they did not qualify all candidates. It is as if these voters did not even vote, as their votes were not counted in the final tally.
Arizonans want an election system that’s easy to vote and hard to cheat. California-style jungle primaries and ranked voting only add to the mistrust, confusion and chaos in our electoral system. Heritage Action is urging voters to vote NO on Proposition 140.
Editor’s note: Nathan Duell is the Arizona state director of Heritage Action for America, Glendale. Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcome at [email protected].