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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"The Maine legislature has changed or repealed all four of the initiatives passed by Maine voters in 2016", said Kyle Bailey of the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting in a statement on Tuesday.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.
(Score: 5, Informative) by MrGuy on Thursday April 19 2018, @12:52PM (4 children)
No system is perfect, and this is certainly a risk.
However, it's much more often the case (you see this fairly commonly when there's a single viable independent candidate in a US election) where the candidate pulls much more strongly from one of the major candidate's bases than the others. In tight races, this tends to produce pressures that distort the electorate and/or frustrate people from expressing their true preference.
Consider a hypothetical. For sake of argument, let's call then Don, Hill, and Bern. Don and Hill are the major party candidates. Bern is an independent. Most of Bern's supporters prefer Hill over Don, and would vote for Hill if Bern wasn't in the race (Don is their least preferred candidate). Hill has significantly more voters than Bern (being the major party candidate), but Bern has a significant number of voters. Let's say Don has 45%, Hill has 40%, and Bern has 15%. The combined Hill and Bern voters slightly outnumber the Don voters, but the Don voters are a plurality (there are more of them than either the Hill or Bern voters individually).
In the current single-candidate system, there's tremendous pressure on Bern to drop out of the race. "He's taking votes away from Hill!" "He's throwing the election to Don!" If Bern stays in the race, he risks his (and his voters) least-preferred candidate winning. And even if he drops out, the result won't simply be all his voters going to Hill - some might decide not to vote at all because they'll be discouraged, so even if he drops out the election will be very close.) And if Bern stays in the race, there will be huge pressure on his voters to vote "strategically" - rather than vote for the candidate they prefer, they should vote for the "more electable" candidate, or they risk "throwing their vote away" in a tight race. If Bern and/or his voters do not bend to pressure, their least-desired result (Don is elected) will happen, frustrating the fact that the majority of the electorate does not want Don elected.
The new Maine system handles this case better (with "better" defined as "comes closest to getting everyone to vote and having a result most in line with what the voters want"). In this system, there's no need for there to be pressure on Bern to drop out, and no voters get discouraged. Everyone goes to the polls. Bern supporters vote Bern-Hill-Don. Hill supporters likely vote Hill-Bern-Don. Don voters lead with Don, and split their second and third preferences. Bern, as the low polling candidate, is eliminated, and his votes are redistributed to his voters second preference (which is largely Hill), leading to Hill being elected.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 19 2018, @05:37PM
In this system, there's no need for there to be pressure on Bern to drop out, and no voters get discouraged. Everyone goes to the polls. Bern supporters vote Bern-Hill-Don. Hill supporters likely vote Hill-Bern-Don. Don voters lead with Don, and split their second and third preferences. Bern, as the low polling candidate, is eliminated, and his votes are redistributed to his voters second preference (which is largely Hill), leading to Hill being elected.
Or, it turns out the pollsters were wrong, and Bern was more popular than they thought, and Bern edges out Hill, but not enough to win over Don under our current system. But under the ranked-choice system, Hill is dropped, and her votes go to their 2nd choices, which are almost all for Bern, and Bern wins. Here, it turns out the voters choosing the "unelectable" candidate were right after all, despite what the media and pollsters were trying to convince them of, and the candidate most preferred by the electorate wins.
This might not happen, but it might; in 2016 we found out in a big way just how wrong the pollsters can be. They insisted up and down that there was absolutely no chance that we'd get the outcome we got, and here we are.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday April 19 2018, @06:47PM
No, The Donald lost the popular vote in this "hypothetical" scenario.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:25PM
Just what I always wanted, giving voice to communists.
To be clear I am not calling Bernie a communist, he clearly sold out to capitalist
billionairesmillionaires.(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 20 2018, @04:11AM
Keep in mind that the ranked choice voting here only applies to Primary elections to nominate party candidates, not to the General elections which actually elect people for office. The original initiative was intended to do so, however this was unanimously ruled unconstitutional by the Maine supreme court as the Maine state constitution explicitly defines the voting system to be based on a plurality, and the initiative was not for a constitutional amendment.
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3728801/Maine-Supreme-Judicial-Court-ruling-on-Ranked.txt [documentcloud.org]