While most of the focus in Maine was on the presidential election, Mainers also voted on who would represent them for the next two years in the U.S. House of Representatives. In particular, the Second Congressional District race was tightly contested between Republican challenger, Austin Theriault, and Democrat incumbent, Rep. Jared Golden. While the votes appear to have leaned toward Golden, they were close enough for both candidates to request a recount.
Despite both candidates’ objections, Maine’s Secretary of State has initiated a ranked-choice voting (RCV) runoff because neither candidate received more than 50% of the first-place votes. The chaos this has created is further proof that RCV should be abolished due to the unnecessary delay and confusion it will cause for Mainers.
The race between Golden and Theriault for Maine’s Second Congressional District was incredibly competitive. Golden is the incumbent representing the district and is known for his status as a co-chair of the “blue dog” caucus, a small group of centrist and conservative Democrats that often vote against their party. Theriault, however, gained much momentum from a Donald Trump endorsement and his opposition to Golden’s post-Lewiston shooting support for a national assault weapons ban.
RCV has been used in Maine for several years now, but since it became law in 2016 via a statewide ballot initiative, there has been much resistance to it, particularly among conservatives. In 2017, Maine’s Supreme Court pointed out the law passed by voters conflicts with how our state constitution requires state-level elections to be conducted. As a result, the system is currently limited to being used only in elections for federal offices and state-level primaries – it cannot be used to determine the winners of state-level general elections.
The steps that RCV elections go through are a complex, multistage process. If no single candidate receives over 50% of the total votes in the first round, those who voted for the least popular candidates have their votes reassigned to their second and subsequent choices until someone reaches 50 percent of the remaining votes.
Thus, because Golden received a first-round vote from only 48.65% of ballots and Theriault only 48.11%, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has triggered the RCV process, delaying the final decision so the ballots that were cast for neither of those two candidates can be redistributed.
While some media outlets reported Golden as having a majority of the votes, those estimates did not include thousands of ballots, some of which were for a valid write-in candidates and some of which had no first choice candidate listed. Because RCV allows voters to list candidates by round, more than 12,000 voters listed no candidate for round one, but potentially listed a candidate as their second choice. These ballots are still counted toward the total of ballots cast in the first round, therefore Golden’s vote total dipped below 50% of ballots cast, triggering an RCV runoff.
Over half of the first-round votes appeared to go to Golden, but this drops below 50% when all the other ballots without a first-round vote are included. Thus, because about three percent of the voters were unsure who to vote for in the first round, the candidate who received the most votes on Election Day will now have to wait potentially weeks for the RCV tabulation and subsequent recount to occur, and so will Maine people.
If ranked choice voting wasn’t applied to this election, Golden would have won, plain and simple. But because these extra ballots are included in the denominator used to determine whether a candidate received 50% of first place votes, a longer, expensive runoff must occur, which will likely produce the same result of a normal plurality election.
Some other states have experimented with RCV as well, namely Alaska. Alaska, however, looks poised to repeal its RCV law via ballot measure this year. Additionally, other states, including Colorado, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon, recently shot down proposals to institute RCV in their 2024 elections. MIssouri voters also approved a ballot measure this year to ban the use of RCV in state-level elections, showing that the momentum across the country is anti-RCV.
Hopefully, Maine will see the changing tides and the significant costs of continuing to have RCV and repeal the policy before it undermines future elections. At a time when suspicions about unfair elections are rampant, unnecessary and costly policies undermining public trust in our elections are no longer worth the trouble.