Tired of ranked-choice voting (RCV) rigging their state’s elections, Maine Republicans have introduced legislation to return the state to a traditional electoral system.
LD 1038, also known as “An Act to Reinstate Plurality Voting by Repealing the Ranked-choice Voting Laws,” stipulates that “the person who receives a plurality of the votes cast for election to any office, as long as there is at least one vote cast for that office, is elected to that office.” The bill also includes the same provisions for primary elections.
“There are increasing complaints from constituents that the ranked-choice experiment has failed to deliver on its promises,” said bill sponsor and GOP Rep. Ed Polewarczyk. “It produces false majorities, frequently exhausts thousands of ballots cast on Election Day, is confusing, and disenfranchises voters who are already unlikely to vote. It is time to return to a simpler, easy-to-understand system where the candidate with the most votes wins.”
Under RCV, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.
During the 2016 election, Maine voters approved the “Maine Ranked Choice Voting” ballot initiative by nearly 32,000 votes (52.1 to 47.9 percent). While the law was originally set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2018, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court found in May 2017 that the use
