There’s something brewing in Maine which may seem unusual to the residents of many other states, but really isn’t all that unique in the far northeastern region at all. If current polling is at all predictive, Maine may once again wind up with a governor who the majority voted against.

With less than three weeks left, this year’s gubernatorial race in Maine is still an unpredictable — and unconventional — contest. LePage is hoping his core voter support is enough to win him a second term, making him perhaps the first governor in U.S. history to win two terms with less than 40 percent of the vote each time.

For Maine Democrats, the scenario is all too familiar. Four years ago, in another crowded gubernatorial race, Cutler pulled support from their party’s candidate. The independent came just 9,000 votes short of the governor’s mansion. The Democratic candidate came in third.

This race once again has three candidates drawing a significant percentage of the vote. Is that a bad thing? It’s important to remember that this is a completely different scenario than presidential elections, where twice we have seen a winner who drew fewer votes than the loser. (That’s a function of the electoral college, and a discussion for another day.) In Maine, the person with the most votes wins, even if that total only amounts to a plurality.

Doug Mataconis has more on this, pointing out that in the last forty years, only two governors have been elected with a majority of the vote.

On some level, I suppose, one could object to the idea that someone could be elected to a position like Governor with less than a majority of the votes, and there are certainly ways to prevent this from happening. Some states deal with the issue by making it incredibly difficult, if not virtually impossible, for viable third-party and independent candidates to get on the ballot and into debates, but those draconian methods have always struck me as improper and distasteful since they essentially involve the two major parties colluding to keep potential competition from messing up their duopoly of power. The most obvious, of course, would be to require a runoff election any time a candidate doesn’t receive more than 50% of the vote. That is an option that is used in many states in the Southern United States, although it must be said that the historical reasons for those runoffs is rooted more in efforts to limit the political power of African-Americans than it was in a desire to ensure that the winning candidate was the one the received majority support. Even without this history, though, runoff elections cost the taxpayers money and, given the fact that they generally produce lower voter turnout than the General Election so one wonders just how representative the electorate that decides the election actually is compared to the one that had voted a months or so beforehand.

As Doug notes, there are issues with runoff elections as well. They cost extra taxpayer money and drag out the results, which can lead to uncertainty on policy decisions during an extended “lame duck” period which is more lame than usual. But unlike presidential elections which are strictly defined by the constitution, the states are allowed to set their own rules for how these things are handled. If the voters of Maine really didn’t like it, (or those in Georgia or Louisiana, for that matter) they could elect state representatives who could change it. As long as they are willing to pay for the extended political circus, that’s their business.

In the end, it’s still a democratic process of sorts. The people decide on the rules and then those same people get to cast their votes inside that structure. If Maine is fine with this, my take is… who are the rest of us to judge?