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posted by martyb on Thursday April 19 2018, @10:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the democracy dept.

Common Dreams reports

Election reform advocates on [April 18] praised a decision by Maine's Supreme Court, upholding the use of ranked-choice voting for the state's upcoming primary elections, saying the ruling demonstrated that the court heeded the demands of Maine voters.

[...]Unlike in traditional voting, in which the candidate with the largest share of votes wins--even if he or she is far from capturing a majority of the support--in ranked choice voting, voters rank each candidate in order of preference. If no candidate has a majority after the first count, the least-popular contender is eliminated, voters' ballots are added to the totals of their second-ranked candidates, and the ballots are recounted. The eliminations and recounts continue until one candidate has a majority.

Supporters of the system say it increases voter turnout and proportional representation.

Maine's June 12 multi-party primary elections, in which voters will choose candidates for governor and congressional districts, will now make history as the first state election to use ranked-choice voting.

Fifty-two percent of Maine voters supported the system in a November 2016 ballot initiative, but lawmakers passed a bill last year delaying its implementation until December 2021 and argued that the state could not use a new voting system without direction from the legislature. The state Senate also threatened to repeal ranked-choice voting altogether if it could not pass a constitutional amendment by then.

More than 77,000 Maine residents signed a petition saying any repeal of the system by the legislature should be voided.

"The Maine legislature has changed or repealed all four of the initiatives passed by Maine voters in 2016", said Kyle Bailey of the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting in a statement on Tuesday. "Today's decision by the Maine Supreme Court confirms that the Maine people are sovereign and have the final say."

The Portland Press Herald, Maine's largest circulation daily newspaper, has extensive background details in their April 17th story: Ranked-choice voting will be used for June primaries, Maine supreme court rules.


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:18PM (1 child)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:18PM (#669036) Homepage Journal

    Did they do anything about gerrymandering? I didn't see that bit.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:57PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:57PM (#669258) Homepage
    If everything is summed in the whole state, then borders are irrelevant, so gerrymandering cannot be done.

    I view many, if not most, of the failings of democracy to be rounding errors. Summing smaller regions, deciding individual regions representation, and then summing those regions to decide the eventual winner introduces 2 rounding errors. If the individual districts (as in the thing Nebraska has 3 of) have their own proportional representation, then district-level gerrymandering will become impossible, but district-level gerrymandering is still possible. If the whole state is summed, then only state border gerrymandering is possible, and fortunately those borders are somewhat fixed now, so that's not a problem.

    My data was assuming the whole state was summed as one entity.
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