Top Four: The Battle for Alaska's Vote
Ranked-Choice Reform, Dark Money, and a State's Fight Over How It Chooses

About this book:

In November 2020, Alaska did something no state had ever dared: it blew up its primary system and replaced it with a radical experiment—an open, nonpartisan "top-four" primary followed by ranked-choice general elections. Funded by outside billionaires and opposed by party establishments, Ballot Measure 2 passed by a single percentage point. Two years later, when Congressman Don Young died after forty-nine years in office, the new system was stress-tested in a chaotic special election featuring forty-eight candidates—including Sarah Palin—and produced a historic upset: Mary Peltola, a Yup'ik Democrat from rural Bethel, became the first Alaska Native in Congress. Reformers called it proof that the system works. Critics called it a rigged catastrophe.

What followed was a four-year proxy war for the soul of American democracy. National reform networks and dark-money groups poured millions into the Last Frontier to defend what they saw as the blueprint for breaking gridlock nationwide. Conservative legal armies and grassroots activists fought back with a repeal campaign that culminated in a 2024 showdown. *Top Four* takes you inside the war rooms where the reform was engineered, the courtrooms where it was contested, and the kitchen tables where voters wrestled with a ballot that rewrote the rules of power. It maps the shadowy money pipelines from both coasts and reveals the paradoxical alliances—moderate Republicans, Democrats, and libertarians united against their own party bosses—that made the experiment possible.

This is not just an Alaska story. In an era when faith in democracy is fraying and polarization paralyzes governance, one state took the ultimate risk: it redesigned the machinery of representation itself. Whether the top-four model is the future of free elections or an overengineered mistake is a question now echoing in statehouses across the country. *Top Four: The Battle for Alaska's Vote* is the definitive, behind-the-scenes account of the most consequential electoral experiment in modern American history—and what it means for your ballot.