The Democrat secretary of state who unilaterally decided to boot former President Donald Trump off Maine’s GOP presidential primary ballot is the poster child for the failures of ranked-choice voting (RCV) — and the perils to the republic RCV presents.
Shenna Bellows, a Trump-hating former ACLU lawyer, appeared to brag on video about how she employed the principles of the preference list scheme during her successful 2020 bid for secretary of state. In elections that employ ranked-choice voting, called “rigged-choice voting” by critics, voters rank candidates by preference so that, if no candidate wins a majority of votes, the loser is eliminated and has his votes reallocated to each voter’s second-choice candidate. The process continues until one candidate has a majority of votes, even if that candidate received fewer “first-choice” votes than others.
Bellows explains in the video, obtained by The Maine Wire, that “the position of secretary of state opened up in 2020, and I really wanted to run.”
In the clip, Bellows says she lobbied colleagues in the Democrat-controlled legislature to at least consider her for their second choice when voting on candidates for the position.
In Maine, the “secretary of state is elected by the legislature, so I was calling my colleagues in the legislature and asking for their votes,” she said. “Many of them had already made pledges to other candidates. But Maine has ranked-choice voting so I did a lot of, ‘OK, that person’s really great but can I be your No. 2 choice?’”
The Portland
