On June 18, 2025, the Maine Legislature passed LD 1666, a bill that aims to extend ranked-choice voting (RCV) to elections for Governor, State Senators, and State Representatives. This post is a call to Governor Janet Mills to veto LD 1666. As she herself once advised the Maine Supreme Judicial Court as Attorney General in 2017, this law violates the Maine Constitution’s plain requirement that elections for these offices must be decided by a plurality of the votes received, not by alternative schemes like RCV.
What the Constitution Requires
Maine’s Constitution sets out a clear and consistent rule for elections to the state’s highest offices: the person who receives a plurality of the votes wins. That rule is repeated in Article IV (for legislators) and Article V (for the governor). In 2017, then-Attorney General Mills summarized our election system this way: “[It] provides for one round of voting at the municipal level, and determination of a winner by plurality based on ‘fair copies’ of the lists of votes, attested to by the municipal officers and delivered to the Secretary of State.”
Why RCV Is Not Plurality Voting
Proponents of RCV argue that the system is just a different method of counting ballots, redistributing votes until two candidates remain. The 2024 Alaska Supreme Court upheld RCV on those grounds. But that ruling interprets Alaska’s constitution—not Maine’s—and its reasoning falls apart under both Alaska and Maine law.
In the Alaska decision, Kohlhaas v. Alaska, the court claimed:
- Rankings are “alternative” expressions of a single vote, not multiple votes.
- RCV does not require a true majority, since the winning candidate may emerge with a plurality of remaining (not total) votes.
- RCV is not a “series of runoff elections,” but simply one extended tabulation.
Janet Mills and the Maine Supreme Judicial Court disagreed firmly in 2017. The attorney general’s reply brief, written by now-Governor Mills, labeled RCV a “fundamentally different voting methodology” to Maine’s plurality system, not just a different tabulation method.
There, she pointed out that it violates both the letter and history of Maine’s Constitution, which was amended in the 19th century precisely to avoid multi-round elections and to ensure a single plurality count chooses a winner.
For much of the 1800s, Maine had a majority election system, and this would lead to widespread runoffs and multiple election counts, some seats having up to seven reelections before a candidate was chosen. Our plurality requirement in the Constitution is not only incidentally a ban on RCV for state offices, but was explicitly included to disallow multi-runoff majority-based systems, like RCV.
Why the Alaska Comparison Fails
RCV proponents invoke Kohlhaas to suggest Maine’s prior rulings are outdated or inapplicable. However, unlike Maine’s, Alaska’s constitution does not embed a historical shift from majority to plurality voting with language that insists on a single count. More importantly, Kohlhaas relies on a frankly absurd legal fiction: a ballot that changes candidates, and then changes hands, multiple times between rounds is still just one vote. Additionally, RCV proponents make the mistake of believing that Alaska’s courts have any binding precedential value in Maine courts, when they have none.
As Mills wrote in 2017, quoting an article in the Vermont Law Review: “Under the instant runoff system…a person whose first choice does not survive the first round has her subsequent choices counted as a new vote in following rounds.”
In other words, RCV does involve multiple rounds and does shift a voter’s ballot from one candidate to another. That is not a single vote, counted once. It is a new vote, counted in a new RCV round.
RCV also fails to meet its own stated majority standard. Proponents claim it ensures a majority winner, but that’s simply not true. In fact, even as admitted by the Alaska Supreme Court, RCV often ends with a candidate winning with less than 50% of the total ballots cast, as was the case in 2018 in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District election, where the winner had only 49.2% including the exhausted ballots that were ignored in the final round of tabulation.
Constitutional Incompatibility
Governor Mills cannot ignore her own prior findings. Her 2017 brief clearly stated: “The ranked-choice voting statute violates the plain meaning of the relevant Constitutional provisions and ignores their history.”
Moreover, the current statute for designating the Secretary of State’s ability to design voting instructions for elections is divided into two types: ranked-choice voting and plurality voting. (21-A M.R.S. § 605-A.1.2). The Legislature itself has previously recognized RCV as a departure from this system. Extending it to constitutionally protected offices—without amending the Constitution—directly violates the separation of powers and the judicial branch’s authority.
The Stakes
This is not a theoretical concern. If LD 1666 is signed into law, it will invite litigation and uncertainty in the outcome of future gubernatorial and legislative elections. The same chaos that the 2017 advisory opinion and Gov. Mills’ briefs were meant to prevent could return. The courts may be forced to strike down election results after they happen, undermining public confidence in Maine’s electoral integrity.
A Final Appeal
Governor Mills, your legal reasoning in 2017 was sound. You understood then what remains true now: the Constitution means what it says. As you yourself once wrote, “Whatever the policy arguments for ranked-choice voting, they simply do not resolve the legal issues presented.”
Please stick to your previous position. LD 1666 is unconstitutional, and you know it.
Please veto LD 1666. Thank you.