The woke policies of the Left are being rejected by the American people nationwide. Their attempts at governance by intimidation and confusion come from a cancer on the human race known as Marxism. When Marxist theories are applied to government, it’s called communism. This dangerous ideology is permeating our colleges and universities right now as we watch these destructive protests on our campuses, funded and led not by college students but by Marxist agitators and leftist dark money organizations.

Their ideas are as bad today as when they enslaved a large part of the world, putting up walls and fences to keep people behind the Iron Curtain and in the Soviet Union. People were unable to flee these communist dictators. And as with every attempt to destroy representative government of, for and by the people, today’s would-be tyrants who cannot win elections at the ballot box are trying to destroy free and fair elections in different ways. One of the schemes they’re trying is called Ranked Choice Voting or RCV.

Let’s take a look at who is behind RCV and why they’re desperate to stop my bill, SB101, from passing in the House this week. It has already passed the Senate and should it pass would head to Gov. Jeff Landry’s desk for signature.

According to the Capitol Research Center, a Washington, DC, think tank that documents non-profit spending through its InfluenceWatch.org project, left-wing megadonors are pouring millions into trying to mainstream this flawed and confusing voting system. 

The two most prominent groups pushing RCV are FairVote and Unite America, both supported by left-wing megadonors. FairVote receives support not only from George Soros but also from his son Jonathan. [Pierre] Omidyar also supports FairVote, as do the Tides Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund—two left-wing philanthropies currently under fire for funding left-wing activists linked to anti-Semitic protests and even Palestinian terrorist groups.

Why would these radical Soros-funded organizations spend millions promoting this voting scheme?

One of the big lies told by these groups is RCV is somehow a superior system because the military uses a form of it for extraordinary and exigent circumstances. When members of our military are deployed, they cannot get to their local voting booth here at home nor does time always allow for getting them ballots in a timely manner for a runoff. This is an inferior system trying to accommodate those circumstances.

In an RCV scheme here at home where we do not face those problems, the one vote is replaced by a complex process that makes voting more difficult for vulnerable voters, like the elderly, who are forced to rank all of the candidates by order of preference. The scheme is so confusing, our election for governor last year would have forced you to vote for all 14 candidates ranked in order of preference. There would be no voting in runoffs if no one gets over 50%–they want you to pick from that long list of candidates day one, then they count, throw out ballots and count again until they tell you who ended up winning the general election.

Everywhere it’s been tried there have been weeks and even months of this “counting” and of throwing out ballots and counting again. In Alaska’s 2022 At-Large Congressional race, even though 60% of the votes cast were by Republicans, after nearly 15,000 ballots were trashed, somehow a Democrat won the seat in Congress for the first time in over 50 years. The results of New York City’s 2021 Democratic mayoral primary took almost a month to announce—even though Eric Adams supposedly won the first round of tabulation. 140,000 ballots were thrown out in that race. As a result, the NAACP slammed the RCV voting system as “voter suppression.” 

When you make the process more complicated, it’s easier to cheat, which is exactly what these Leftists have in mind.

Make no mistake, RCV is complicated and will further diminish voter confidence in our elections. It is a dangerous scheme backed by people who do not believe in the American way of life, people who think they know better how to run your life than you do.

We do not need to abandon our one American citizen, one vote system. I hope you will let your legislators know you support the passage of SB101 to stop RCV schemes from corrupting elections in Louisiana.

Sen. Blake Miguez is a member of the Louisiana Senate representing the 22nd District.