Vice President JD Vance on Thursday played dumb when asked about ranked-choice voting, claiming that he doesn’t “understand” the method despite its use in dozens of communities across the country.
“It seems to me that you have an election, the person who wins the most votes should win. That seems to be not what happens with ranked-choice voting,” said the Yale Law School grad-turned-veep while responding to a reporter’s question on the U.S. Senate race controversy in Alaska, where residents approved of the method in 2020.
“I’m not a big fan of it. The fact that it’s so confusing to a person who pays pretty close attention to politics, I think, suggests we should do our elections in, like, the normal way, which is if you vote for a person and they get more votes for the other person, they should win.”
Vance seems to suggest that the popular vote should determine elections and, therefore, implies that the Electoral College should be abolished for presidential elections.
President Donald Trump, of course, lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Unlike Vance, Americans don’t seem very confused about ranked-choice voting, with polls showing a majority of voters — including Alaskans — favor the method in their elections.
Critics teased Vance over his election take, including “Pod Save America” co-host Dan Pfeiffer, who wrote on X, “Wait till @JDVance hears about the electoral college.”
Others chimed in with reminders about how Trump first booked his ticket to the Oval Office, with one user on the platform simply writing, “The person who gets the most votes doesn’t even get elected president.”
Others focused on the veep’s confusion claim, with The Texas Observer’s special investigative correspondent Steven Monacelli calling it “yet another indictment against the Ivy League,” while another argued he’s a “professional at pretending to be a dumbass.”