Why Maine should get rid of ranked-choice voting

By Matthew Gagnon

This week, Maine is once again coming face to face with the foolishness of its decision to adopt ranked-choice voting in 2016. 

Heading into 2024, I thought we’d be spared this nonsense, as Maine’s 2nd Congressional District race was slated to be a two-person race between incumbent U.S. Rep. Jared Golden and challenger Austin Theriault, and a two-person race would prevent ranked-choice voting from being triggered.

And yet, as I write this column, the state is going through what will likely prove to be an unnecessary and confusing “tabulation” of the election held last Tuesday. This tabulation was triggered by two considerations that most of us likely hadn’t really considered.

The first was that there was an official, registered write-in candidate — Diana Merenda — whose votes would be recorded and tallied, giving us a third vote-getter who could drag down the winner in a close race under 50 percent. 

The second reason, though, is the more ridiculous, I believe. There were more than 12,000 voters who turned in a ballot that left their first choice blank. 

Why is this important, and why does it then force us to do a ranked-choice voting tabulation? Great question, let me explain. 

Let’s start with a simple query: What do you consider blank votes to be in an election like this? Are they “non-votes” given that the voter left that particular round blank? If so, then we really wouldn’t need to be doing anything right now, because they wouldn’t be counted in the overall vote share.

This is Golden’s position. He argues that the race is already over, and this ranked-choice tabulation is unnecessary and unlawful. People chose not to vote in the first round, and as such they are not participants in the system. 

But is a person who shows up to vote on Election Day, walks into a voting booth and casts a ballot — even if they intentionally leave that first round blank — really not a participant? Or is the very act of not voting itself a vote of sorts? If so, then the calculus that neither candidate obtained 50 percent is correct.

There is a third perspective though, which is currently the policy being pursued by Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. To this point of view, blank votes in the first round would be blank votes, but there is the possibility that some of the blank votes would have marked a candidate in their “second choice” line. This, to Bellows, means that they are participants in the election, and given the secretary of state’s rules related to counting votes with skipped rounds, those “second choice” votes need to be pushed forward to “first choice” votes. Because those second choice votes could, if made first choice votes, change the outcome, Bellows argues that a tabulation needs to be run. 

Which in and of itself highlights that there is a more fundamental problem with ranked-choice voting: Depending on the rules chosen by the state, the same voter selections could end up counted differently. 

After ranked-choice voting was enacted in Maine, the secretary of state’s office decided on certain rules that decided how it counted votes. One of those rules dealt with “vote skipping” in rounds. 

If a voter skips one round but votes in the following round, Maine will pull ahead the vote from the next round and move it into the skipped round. If a voter skips two rounds, Maine treats the ballot as exhausted.

Why? Because the secretary of state’s office needed to choose some kind of standard, and that was the one they arrived at. But they just as easily could view skipped rounds as exhausted, or decide to move forward two skips or three skips. 

The problem is, depending on which rule you adopt, the counts would change. 

And that doesn’t even touch on the decision to batch eliminate candidates by round versus eliminating a single candidate each time. Advocates say this streamlines and simplifies the count while ensuring the same results, but that is not always true. The order and manner in which candidates are eliminated can in fact impact the redistribution of votes and, consequently, the final outcome. 

In the end, there is a reason why four states — Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon — rejected ballot initiatives that proposed ranked-choice voting this year. There is a reason why Alaska, which adopted the system after Maine, appears to have now thought better of it and thrown out ranked-choice voting. There is a reason that Missouri actually banned the system in its constitution this year. 

I view ranked-choice voting as a well-meaning experiment that was flawed from the start. It is needlessly complex, remains confusing to voters, prolongs the decision and, ultimately, gets us nothing of value. It is time to get rid of it.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.