Maine’s high court calls Democratic ranked-choice voting expansion unconstitutional

By Michael Shepherd, Bangor Daily News Staff

AUGUSTA — A Democratic bill to expand the use of ranked-choice voting would violate the Maine Constitution, the state’s high court said in an April 6 opinion.

It came in response to an effort to apply ranked-choice voting to elections for governor and Legislature. Maine has used the voting method in primaries for state and federal office and general elections for Congress. Lawmakers expanded it to presidential elections in 2020.

But ranked-choice voting has never been used in general elections for state office because the high court opined in 2017 that it would conflict with a provision in the Maine Constitution requiring those races to be decided by a plurality. The court held its position in a 30-page ruling that is likely to doom the attempted workaround, which never looked likely to succeed.

“Rather, the Maine Constitution clearly establishes that the winner is ‘the first to pass the post’ in the election,” the judges wrote.

The Maine Senate asked the judges to weigh in on the law for the second time in a decade while considering a bill from Sen. Cameron Reny, D-Bristol, that would change definitions in the law to effectively say the winner of a ranked-choice voting contest is also a plurality winner. 

Attorney General Aaron Frey broke from Democrats to argue it was unconstitutional. Legislative Republicans joined him. Top Democratic lawmakers argued in favor of Reny’s bill, joined by advocates including the League of Women Voters of Maine and FairVote, a national group that supports ranked-choice voting.