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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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Friday November 16 2018, @11:21AM (5 children)
“It is now officially clear I won the constitutional ‘one-person, one-vote’ first-choice election on Election Day that has been used in Maine for more than 100 years,” Poliquin said in a written statement after the results were announced. “We will proceed with our constitutional concerns about the ranked-vote algorithm.”
No - it is now officially clear that those who felt the freedom to vote for minor candidates knowing that they would still have their preference between the big two counted were perfectly happy to so do. Had they known that the less democratic plurality scheme was in use, many of these people would have realised that their third party vote would be wasted, and would have "tactically voted" (it's a terrible term that makes a bad thing sound clever) - in a ratio of 2:1 for the Dems. And you'd have lost.
This election is the first step towards lifting the veil on the idea of voting for minority candidates - they clearly aren't wasted votes, because they do not stop you from influincing the final outcome even if your first choice isn't taken. One might even say that such voters are expressing more with their vote than big-two voters are (they aren't given more power or influence, but the information-theoretic payload delivered by their vote is bigger). I hope this encourages more people to vote for minorities next year.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Disagree) by SixGunMojo on Friday November 16 2018, @12:46PM (1 child)
I'm pretty sure he understands how run-off voting works, he's just running the Clintonista playbook from the 2016 election:
"but she won the popular vote!" Well congradu-fucking-lations, but them's not the rules of the game.
I'm also pretty sure had this gone the other way (R over D) this would have become a national shitstorm about stolen elections and "the will of the people".
Then we'd really be hearing from people who don't understand run-off elections.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @08:47PM
What makes you say that? All the "shitstorming" I've seen so far has been due to a D winning the popular vote but somehow still losing the elections. So far it seems like Republicans are the ones who throw temper tantrums. Calling for vote recounts is not "a shitstorm", that is simply attempting to ensure the integrity of democracy.
See I have the benefit of actual evidence to draw my opinion from. All those Republicans that gerrymandered the fuck out of their districts are now so very angry that they still lost.
I dream of a new conservative party that can actually handle objective reality and actually uphold the standard conservative values without the Bible thumping bullshit. * am not conservative but it pains me to have to even hear about the level of insanity the current GOP has normalized
(Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Friday November 16 2018, @06:29PM (2 children)
Apparently, the Republican candidate doesn't understand how run-off voting works:
Sure he does! He understands that it makes the election more responsive to the will of the people and is, therefore, bad for Republicans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:46AM
You wanted Jeb Bush, didn't you?
Because run-off voting is how you get the blandest candidate possible, which was Jeb!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday November 18 2018, @12:25AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves