AMAC Action, along with other members of the Election Integrity coalition testified last Tuesday at a hearing held by the Wisconsin State Senate Committee on Shared Revenue, Elections, and Consumer Protection regarding SB 528, a proposed “final five” law that would use ranked choice voting (RCV) to determine the winner of Wisconsin’s elections for federal office holders.
The Wisconsin effort to pass RCV legislation was met with resistance from a coalition of election integrity groups. According to a story in The Federalist, these organizations wrote Republican leaders of the state legislature to warn them that, “Both ‘final five’ ‘jungle’ primaries and disastrous RCV (also known as ‘Instant-Runoff Voting’ and ‘preferential’ voting) are schemes that have made voting more difficult, reduced transparency, and put confidence and certainty at risk when implemented in public elections,” the organizations wrote. “The result is an epidemic of disenfranchised voters whose ballots no longer are counted fairly and equally.”
AMAC members have been actively engaged to defeat ranked-choice voting measures in states throughout the country for the past two years. This year alone, the AMAC membership helped to defeat RCV initiatives in Illinois, Idaho, North Dakota, and Montana.
Last week in the Badger State, AMAC members sent each committee member over 820 messages in opposition to RCV with most emails coming on the day of the hearing. In all, a total of over 4,100 messages were sent to the committee. This effort was joined with testimony from AMAC Action Senior Vice President Andy Mangione who spoke on behalf of the more than 48,000 AMAC members in Wisconsin (click button below to read his testimony).
Among the many who testified against SB 528 was Jordan Kittleson, Policy Director for the Center for Election Integrity, which is part of the America First Policy Institute, who commented, “Tens of thousands of Wisconsinites have made the following clear to their State Legislature after [last] Tuesday’s committee hearing: Final Five and Ranked Choice Voting systems muddy the waters of one person having their one voted counted one time. In a time when Americans are demanding and deserve timely and accurate election results now more than ever, to infuse such confusion into our tabulation processes is purely a solution in search of a problem.”
AMAC Action remains resolute in our commitment to keep America’s elections free and fair by advancing sensible election integrity legislation and stopping attempts by Democrats to employ tactics that would game the election system and disenfranchise voters.
