Time
In
November, Maine voters will decide whether they want to become the
first state in the U.S. to implement ranked-choice voting. If a ballot
initiative is approved, future Maine voters in primaries and general
elections will be allowed to rank their choices for governor, Congress
and statehouse races instead of voting for just one. If no one gets a
majority in a race, the candidate who came in last is eliminated and the
second choices of their voters are redistributed, in much the same way
that a runoff election works. That process continues through multiple
rounds until a single candidate reaches a majority.
The state has
long struggled with elections that end without a clear mandate from the
voters. In nine of the past 11 races for governor, the winner has
received less than a majority, including as low as 35%. (The two
exceptions, in 1982 and 1998, involved popular governors running for
re-election.) Current Gov. Paul LePage, who won 38% in a four-way race
in 2010 and was re-elected with 48% in a three-way race in 2014, remains
one of the most unpopular governors in the country.
Kyle Bailey,
an independent consultant running the Committee for Ranked Choice
Voting behind the initiative, says most voters he’s talked to quickly
grasp the concept once he’s had a chance to explain it.
“We make
ranked choices every day of our lives, we just don’t necessarily think
about it,” he said, before settling on an analogy that seems appropriate
in the Northeast. “When I go to Dunkin Donuts, I get a multigrain
bagel. I know that if they don’t have any, then my second choice is a
garlic bagel.”
FairVote, an advocacy group that promotes
ranked-choice voting nationwide, used polls to model how Trump might
have fared if some Republican primaries had been held under that system.
If their model is accurate, Trump would have had a reversal of fortune
on his big sweep on Super Tuesday, losing seven of 11 states instead of
winning that number.
Reformers began to experiment with
ranked-choice voting in races for mayor and city council in
liberal-leaning cities like Portland, Maine; Takoma Park, Maryland;
Cambridge, Massachusetts; Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota; and San
Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro in California. The Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences even adopted it when it expanded
the Best Picture nomination pool for the Oscars in 2009.
David
Kimball, a professor of political science at the University of
Missouri-St. Louis, studied cities with ranked-choice voting and
traditional ballots for a paper to be published later this year.
“We
found that turnout in ranked-choice voting cities was nine or 10
percentage points higher than comparable cities in a primary or runoff
election,” he said.
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