After taking the defective voting method known as Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) for a test drive, Arlington County, Virginia, rightly concluded that it’s a lemon.
The county gave RCV its first test in the May Democratic primary to fill two county board seats. But widespread voter confusion over RCV’s complicated tabulation formula and unpredictable results led Arlington to send it to the junkyard after just one use.
Arlington was the first jurisdiction in Virginia to use RCV, and if voters are lucky, it will also be the last.
Most Americans understand how elections work: the person with the most votes wins. But under RCV, all that changes. Rather than vote for one candidate in a race, voters rank many candidates in every race. If no candidate gets more than 50% of the first-place vote, candidates are eliminated and votes are redistributed until someone clinches a majority of the remaining ballots.
In Arlington, voters were asked to rank three out of six candidates from first to last. After multiple rounds of elimination, the candidates who got the first and third most first-place votes wound up winning.
Arlington voters found out first hand why the Washington Post called RCV a “hard to follow” that “not many people understand.” But RCV is problematic for more reasons than its cumbersome nature.
If a voter fails to rank every candidate on their ballot, they risk having their one and only vote thrown out during elimination rounds, a common occurrence euphemistically dismissed as “ballot exhaustion” but that in truth amounts to disenfranchisement.
Often, the candidates who should win in ordinary elections are ultimately defeated by RCV. That happened to Arlington’s Natalie Roy, who got the second most votes and would otherwise have secured one of the two nominations. Republican Congressman Bruce Poliquin of Maine also won a plurality of votes but went on to lose his RCV election. Concerns over the undemocratic nature of RCV prompted the Arlington NAACP to closely monitor RCV election results so that “no one’s foundational right to vote becomes disenfranchised or impeded.”
Proponents of RCV used to claim that the system ensures candidates win with a majority of public support. But now, their tune is changing. FairVote, the largest national organization pushing for widespread use of RVC, recently conceded to The Washington Post that RCV is focused on giving “more of a voice” to “factions that are not large enough to win a seat otherwise.”
In fact, FairVote defended Arlington’s bizarre results, claiming that RCV helps ensure that a “narrow majority” does not win. There you have it: RCV is not about revealing consensus, it is about suppressing majorities in favor of election results that political elites deem sufficiently inclusive.
Even worse is the fact that efforts to establish unwieldy RCV are fueled by left-wing dark money groups focused on reshaping elections for partisan gain. Groups backed by left-wing mega donors like George Soros are funding lobbyists and ballot measure initiatives to push RCV nationwide.
They start with cities and counties, hoping to normalize RCV in smaller contests where the problems are easier to conceal. Then they push RCV for state and federal elections.
Meanwhile, other big monied special interests and even wealthy foreign investors are backing programs that use lawsuits to rewrite state voting laws or push liberal influence into election offices through programs like the U.S Alliance for Election Excellence. In other words, the left is trying to comprehensively reshape voting for political gain.
Virginia is not the only state where dark-money forces have tried to re-engineer elections using RCV. So far, two states and about 60 cities and counties are using RCV. Many others may face pro-RCV dark money-backed ballot measures in 2024. But states are beginning to push back. Already, five states have banned RCV including Tennessee, Florida, Idaho, South Dakota and Montana.
And jurisdictions that tried RCV are walking away. Utah launched a pilot RCV program in 2019. 23 towns and cities ultimately joined, but now nearly half have since pulled out over concerns about cost and diminishing public trust in election processes from using RCV.
Sixty-five percent of voters in Aspen, Colorado likewise voted to repeal RCV in favor of returning to a traditional election process after just one election relying on the gimmicky system. And Alaskans may do the same.
What is clear is that RCV fails to either improve election processes or deliver confidence. Arlington County is the latest to try it and reject it. It’s time for every state to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat by banning ranked-choice voting.
Jason Snead is executive director of Honest Elections Project Action, a nonpartisan group supporting free and honest elections.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
“Most Americans understand how elections work: the person with the most votes wins.”
?????? HuH!!! YoU sure about that, buckaroo?
Say I want to verify AFTER the election that my ballot was counted and accurately selected my choices, could I do so in the USA?
NO, NEGATIVE! No way in creation! Ballots and ballot images are EXEMPT from public disclosure laws and the same applies to voting systems code and ballot scanner firmware ——- UNDERSTOOD????
And RCV is just a lesser way to rig elections!
So do most Americans really understand American elections???