The last time we checked in on the battle over ranked-choice voting in Maine, the issue was tied up in legal challenges. Most of the questions centered on whether or not the petitioners in a referendum movement to get rid of the system had properly collected enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot. (Some of the signatures were collected by volunteers who had not yet registered to vote themselves as required by Maine election laws.) That issue has now been put to rest.
A court found this week that the plaintiff’s argument about the signatures was not persuasive, effectively knocking the referendum off the ballot. That leaves the existing system in place and, even more alarmingly, means that ranked-choice voting may be used on ballots for the general election on November 3rd. This will be the first time that this warped way of handling elections will be used in a presidential election in the nation’s history. (Bangor Daily News)
Ranked-choice voting will be used in the presidential election in Maine this fall after the state’s high court ruled that Republicans did not gather enough valid signatures to put forward a people’s veto effort challenging the voting method.
The decision, coming after months of legal challenges and an initial ruling from the Maine Supreme Judicial Court earlier this month that allowed the state to begin printing ballots, is a victory for Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, a Democrat whose office twice determined that opponents of ranked-choice voting failed to get enough signatures.
It marks perhaps the last twist in a tumultuous effort and brings a historic election this fall, when Maine will be the first state to use ranked-choice voting in a presidential election. Proponents of the referendum faced a shorter signature-gathering season due a shortened legislative session due to the coronavirus pandemic.
This is bad news for fans of standard, straightforward elections where each person receives one vote and the winner is the candidate (or proposal) that receives the highest number of votes. Sadly, this aberration is spreading like a different sort of plague. Massachusetts is working on a similar scheme this year and Kansas began looking into it last year. Maine is still the only place this is being done statewide, but cities and towns in 20 other states are already using various versions of this plan. But at least for now, Maine is the only one doing it for presidential elections.
Proponents of ranked-choice voting continue to argue that this system provides for a winner who gains a majority of the votes and spares taxpayers the expense of having to have a runoff election. Neitehr of these arguments has ever struck me as particularly compelling. Taking them in reverse order, I will agree that keeping a close eye on the public purse is always a good idea. But when it comes to electing public officials, is saving a few bucks really the bottom line we’re aiming for?
As to the idea that you wind up with a winner who has a majority, that’s also true, but largely irrelevant. Nothing in the Constitution says that the winner of any election has to have a majority to win. In fact, the Founders went out of their way to design a system where more than two candidates would be involved in most races, including that for the presidency. When you have three or more viable candidates with measurable levels of support, the odds are that you will never have a winner taking more than 50% and the Founders knew that.
Even under Maine’s system, the final winner didn’t really get 50% of the vote, did they? In the original run of an election that goes to an instant runoff, nobody received a majority. The people whose votes went for one of the less popular candidates but were then reassigned had their original choice taken away. All this does is reinforce the idea of a fixed, two-party system where outsiders are not welcome. And the votes for those trailing candidates wind up disappearing from the history books.
The Supreme Court has never ruled on this question, mostly because there hasn’t been a need yet. How the states and cities handling voting in their own, localized elections is largely up to them. But now that this nonsense is going to be infecting the presidential race, perhaps they should.
