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posted by martyb on Friday November 16 2018, @05:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the raises-a-challenge-only-after-votes-were-cast dept.

NPR is reporting that Democrat Jared Golden has been declared the winner of Maine House District 2 after ranked-choice voting (RCV) boosted his vote count over Republican Bruce Poliquin. Poliquin had received more initial votes than Golden, but did not receive the requisite 50% of the vote.

Maine's new ranked-choice system of voting allows voters to rank candidates in their order of preference and to transfer their votes if no candidate gets more than 50 percent.

Local newspaper Portland Press Herald fills in some details:

Golden captured 50.5 percent of the vote to Poliquin’s 49.5 percent to become the first challenger to defeat an incumbent in Maine’s sprawling 2nd District in a century. The Marine Corps veteran and Lewiston lawmaker also made history by winning the nation’s first congressional election to utilize ranked-choice voting, enabling him to erase an initial deficit by securing the second- and third-choice votes of people who cast their ballots for two independents.

The final vote tally was 139,231 votes for Golden versus 136,326 votes for Poliquin – a margin of 2,905 votes.

However, Thursday’s ranked-choice voting results won’t be the final word on the 2nd District race, which was one of the most expensive in the country. Poliquin defiantly declared Thursday afternoon that he “won the constitutional ‘one-person, one-vote'” tally on Election Day and vowed to continue his lawsuit challenging the legality of ranked-choice voting.

[...] Poliquin led Golden by 2,632 votes after Election Day, according to unofficial results from the Secretary of State’s Office. But neither Poliquin nor Golden received majority support during the initial tally, with both pulling in roughly 46 percent, while independents Tiffany Bond and William Hoar received a combined 8 percent of the vote.

That triggered Thursday’s ranked-choice runoff, which came after staffers in Secretary of State Matt Dunlap’s office spent several days scanning and downloading all of the nearly 290,000 ballots cast in the 2nd District on Nov. 6. The runoff only took a few minutes to complete as a specialized computer software eliminated Hoar and Bond from the equation and redistributed their supporters’ votes to the candidates – either Poliquin or Golden – who they had ranked highest.

In the end, Golden gained 10,232 votes from the ranked-choice retabulations while Poliquin gained 4,695 votes. That allowed Golden to overcome a 2,632-vote deficit from the initial vote. Roughly 8,000 of the ballots cast for the independents did not designate an additional choice or did not select either of the major-party candidates.

Maine voters first approved the switch to ranked-choice voting in November 2016 and then reaffirmed that decision via a second ballot initiative in June.

Also at WGME.


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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Friday November 16 2018, @09:53AM (6 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Friday November 16 2018, @09:53AM (#762626)

    Is RCV any different from the rest of the world's STV? Just wondering, from the description it sounds pretty much identical.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 16 2018, @03:46PM (4 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Friday November 16 2018, @03:46PM (#762717)

    I think in this case it's the same. Basically it comes down to implementation details - I believe STV is the simplest way to implement a RCV system. There's lots of others once you get people used to ranked voting, designed to give "better" results according to various criteria, but they mostly come with the penalty of being harder for most people to understand, and being able to understand how the system works is kind of important to having people feel like the vote isn't being rigged.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 16 2018, @06:32PM (3 children)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 16 2018, @06:32PM (#762792) Journal

      Besides which, most of the systems produce a "best choice" in a considerably larger percentage of sample cases than does "plurality wins", which was the worst choice outside of single party in the Scientific American article a couple of decades ago. Condorcet voting was the best, but is more complex and hard to describe, and not that much better than Instant Runoff.

      All of the systems have the liability that they increase information overload, and all the ones studied in the article have the defect that they don't include "none of the above".

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      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 16 2018, @07:48PM (2 children)

        by Immerman (3985) on Friday November 16 2018, @07:48PM (#762819)

        How does including "none of the above" improve things over just not voting? Or do you mean the ability to vote *against* a specific candidates, instead of only for their opponents?

        There are some systems that attempt to select the least unpopular candidate, rather than the most popular, which is an interesting philosophical premise, though that would seem to me in practice to give a greatly outsized advantage to relatively unknown minor candidates that you would have voted against if you knew anything about them. Unless everyone gets in the habit of voting against such candidates on general principle - in which case you've locked them out of the race even more soundly than under first-past-the-post.

        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday November 17 2018, @05:07PM (1 child)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 17 2018, @05:07PM (#763148) Journal

          I mean the ability to say "none of the above are acceptable, hold another election, with all current candidates disqualified". Ideally it would never win, but it should be there.

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          • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday November 18 2018, @03:27PM

            by Immerman (3985) on Sunday November 18 2018, @03:27PM (#763508)

            Now there's an interesting idea. My gut response is that it would never be anything but symbolic. But then I think of the silent majority that don't vote in most elections, many because they don't think there's a meaningful difference between candidates. Give them the power to force a "do over" from scratch? That might be interesting.

            I assume you would be able to vote "none of the above" as your first (or any other) pick, and have your vote roll over to your next choice as normal if it didn't win? After all, you don't want to discourage people from voting the rascals out if that's their first impulse. Ranked voting, AND the option for a blanket no confidence vote below any point? That could be devastating to modern politics - but I'm really not sure if for good or ill.

            It would certainly cause some succession problems. What would you do, let the second-place candidate serve in the interim? The job still needs to be done, but you probably don't want the incumbent holding on to their job after they would have lost it otherwise - that's setting up some seriously bad mojo perverse incentives.

  • (Score: 1) by aebonyne on Friday November 16 2018, @11:38PM

    by aebonyne (5251) on Friday November 16 2018, @11:38PM (#762901) Homepage

    Short answer: no, they're the same thing. Single transferable vote (STV) [wikipedia.org] is a generalization of instant-runoff voting (IRV) [wikipedia.org] to multi-seat elections. In other words, for a single-winner election, STV and IRV are identical [wikipedia.org].

    (Instant-runoff voting is what people usually mean when they say "RCV" even though other ranked-choice voting (RCV) [wikipedia.org] systems exist; the main lobbying group for IRV in the US, FairVote [wikipedia.org], likes to conflate the two.)

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