Why Jared Golden’s win over Austin Theriault will survive ranked-choice voting

By Michael Shepherd, Bangor Daily News Staff

The closest congressional race in modern Maine history is going to a ranked-choice count between U.S. Rep. Jared Golden and state Rep. Austin Theriault.

But the count that will decide the winner in the 2nd Congressional District is a formality at this point. Theriault would have to win a nearly impossible share of blank ballots to flip the outcome. The Bangor Daily News and Decision Desk HQ declared Golden the winner on Wednesday after military and overseas ballots broke heavily for the third-term Democrat.

Here are three things to know about the math of this election.

This election is weird.

Under ranked-choice voting, a candidate who receives more than 50 percent of votes in the initial count is declared the winner. If no candidate reaches 50 percent after the initial count, the candidate who placed last is eliminated and the second-choice votes from their ballots are distributed to the remaining candidates.

This election is an oddity because ranked-choice voting typically applies to races with three or more candidates on the ballot. There was a third person in the race but not on the ballot, Diana Merenda of Surry, whose write-in campaign focused on the Israel-Hamas war.

Golden leads Theriault by roughly half a percentage point, or 2,159 votes. Merenda won only 420, according to tallies released Thursday by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ office. The ballots that forced the count were the 12,635 ballots — or 3.1 percent overall — that did not indicate a first choice and have so far been counted as blank.

Theriault’s path to victory relies on almost impossible math.

Maine voters are allowed to skip their first choice on the ballot. If they pick a second choice, that candidate would be bumped up to the first position during next week’s ranked-choice count.

But very few voters do this. During Golden’s first campaign in 2018, only 9 percent of voters who left their first choice blank made a second choice. That share was only 6 percent in 2022.

If an unusually high 15 percent of voters did that this year, Theriault would only beat Golden if he was the second choice of 97 percent of those who either blanked their first choice or picked Merenda, according to research from the electoral reform group FairVote.

While the BDN and Decision Desk HQ have called the race for Golden, the Associated Press and other media outlets have not. That is because outlets are generally shy to call ranked-choice voting elections until it is clear that the winner has an outright majority.

This is the first ranked-choice voting contest that Decision Desk HQ has ever called in this situation. For example, it has not called a House race in Alaska that is subject to ranked-choice voting even though the leader is close to a majority. 

Drew McCoy, the president of Decision Desk HQ, said he sees a major difference between blank votes and votes for a candidate that make the Maine situation more predictable.

“It’s simply not a reasonable margin to overcome in a ranked-choice voting scenario,” he said of Theriault’s position entering the count.

Golden has objected to the count.

In a letter, a lawyer for Golden objected to the ranked-choice count, saying the congressman won a majority of the first-place votes. Bellows’ office is pressing, with spokesperson Emily Cook citing the need to run the tally to discover whether the ballots now labeled as blank have valid second choices.

Theriault’s campaign has requested a recount that would take place after next week’s ranked-choice tally. The only way that the race would shift is if major counting issues are discovered in a recount.