ANCHORAGE — As the remaining votes in Alaska continue to be counted. IVN’s projection that Ballot Measure 2 will fail holds. Not only that, but the vote to keep nonpartisan primaries, ranked choice voting, and campaign finance transparency rules will win by its widest margin.
With each update No on 2 continues to extend its lead.
— Scott Kendall (@scooterkendall) November 11, 2026
The latest ballots create another 2,000 votes margin and No is now leading by over 5%!#akleg #NoOn2AK https://t.co/JnBJrvSRgY pic.twitter.com/XBN7ETWfpl
The ‘No’ vote started at 51.2% to 48.8% with 27% of votes outstanding. As of this writing, the margin has widened, 52.6% to 47.4% with 13% of the vote outstanding. The mandate from Alaska voters is clear at this point: They want to keep their reforms.
They want to keep a primary election system that allows all voters to cast a ballot for whomever they want, regardless of party, in every contest. They don’t want to go back to a system in which the parties decide their voting rights, particularly the 63% of the electorate registered as independents.
They want to keep ranked choice voting, which gives them the option to rank the top four candidates on the general election ballot in order of preference. If no candidate wins an outright first-choice majority, RCV runoffs determine a majority winner.
They don’t want to go back to a system in which the type of partisan games (i.e. recruiting same-name / non-serious candidates) that were played in this election could have actually spoiled the outcome because winners can be chosen by plurality instead of a majority.
Shawn Griffiths
They want to keep campaign finance transparency rules and “true source” requirements that reveal who is really trying to influence state elections by injecting huge sums of cash through groups like the Aurora Action Network, a dark money group that funded the repeal campaign.
When the ‘No’ vote started at a majority, we knew the repeal effort was going to fail for the second time in two years. In the past, the pro-reform vote has had to come from behind with the majority of outstanding absentee ballots.
It was the case in 2020. It happened again in 2024.
The difference this year was ‘No’ started ahead. IVN beat every other outlet to a projection not on a hunch, but math. If a majority of outstanding ballots favor reform, then No’s majority was only going to expand.
So, why hasn’t the AP called it? Or another outlet?
There are technically still enough outstanding ballots that could flip the results, and the election night outcome was close. However, for ‘Yes’ to win, it would need two-thirds of the remaining vote.
This would require a complete reversal of the voting trends.
There is nothing stopping the repeal campaign from trying a third time, but after back-to-back losses, and with a stronger majority than ever before in favor of reform, will they seriously put voters through this again?