CRC on Ranked-Choice Voting and United for Democracy

The news media frequently asks CRC to provide context on organizations and current issues. Here are two recent instances (direct quotations in red):

Ranked-Choice Voting

Scott Walter quoted in The Washington Times:

Scott Walter, president of the Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, compared ranked-choice elections to “putting the votes in a blender.”

He said the method does not honor the will of the majority of the electorate but does the bidding of wealthy megadonors, most of them liberals, who want to eliminate hard-right conservative and fringe liberal candidates from public office regardless of their popularity with voters.

The list of donors supporting ranked-choice voting initiatives includes the Soros-backed Open Society Foundations and Kathryn Murdoch, a frequent donor to liberal causes who was a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Another big donor backing the effort is former Obama fundraiser and Democratic donor Katherine Gehl.

Republican megadonors Ken Griffin and Michael Porter have funded ranked-choice voting initiatives, but Mr. Walter said, “It’s overwhelmingly a crusade funded by left-wing Democrats.”

Mr. Walter said ranked-choice voting undercuts the primary process, which hurts both major political parties but empowers ultra-wealthy donors.

“I see it as a further weakening of the two-party system. And as bad as the two parties are, they are a lot more accountable and a lot better than the megadonors,” Mr. Walter said.

United for Democracy and Court Packing

Parker Thayer quoted in the Daily Caller:

“Calling United for Democracy’s smears of this case ‘casting stones from a glass house’ would be an insult to the structural integrity of glass houses,” Capital Research Center Investigative Researcher Parker Thayer told the DCNF. “United for Democracy and its members are funded by special interests far more than the parties involved in this case supposedly are. There doesn’t seem to be a single left-wing billionaire, labor union, or ESG-supporting corporation whose money isn’t somehow represented in the United for Democracy Coalition.”

. . .

Thayer noted many of the same groups backing United for Democracy also back Just Majority, a coalition of over 30 left wing groups that support court packing.

“Any group involved in efforts to pack the court should not be taken seriously when they try to catastrophize about the impacts of a possible Supreme Court decision,” he said.