Question 5 passed last November. It was to use ranked choice voting for all elections to the Legislature, Congress, and Governor.
The court struck it down because of issues with “plurality” in the state constitution.
So this was an advisory opinion from the state Supreme Court?
I note that it was the Maine court ruling on the Maine Constitution, (with a serious dearth of Maine legislators claiming that the court erred in its decision).
The topic of ranked choice voting does not appear to be an issue that has been addressed by any U.S. court and even in Maine it appears to be an issue that is still open to further discussion, (provided the constitutional language is addressed).
I had to look up what plurality meant, seems like they’re only considering your first choice as a vote, when in reality all your choices are votes.
I pretty much always give my first choice to the nutbag candidate on my “side”, my second then goes to the mainstreamer. So if push comes to shove and it goes to preferences, my loony gets eliminated and my 2nd choice then counts as a primary vote.
Well, to pick nits, all your choices are preferences expressed with respect to your one vote.
A quick look at the Constitution of Maine Art IV Pt 1 section 5 and Pt 2 sections 3 and 4 suggests that the court is correct. The process described there presumes a voting system in which a voter must allocate his vote to one candidate absolutely, with the candidate securing a plurality of votes being elected. Changing this system might be a very good idea, but the way to do that is to amend or replace the relevant sections of the Constitution. And it doesn’t seem that the Constitution can be amended by petition and referendum.
It does look like the Maine Constitution does define elections by plurality, not majority, and it seems perfectly plausible (not having read the actual ruling) that a legal analysis would conclude the author’s intent was the classic largest-single-vote-getter standard. So ranked choice for state level offices would have required a constitutional amendment.
Since several states do have a system of runoff elections to achieve a majority, it would seem that there is so far no *federal *constitutional impediment to direct-popular-vote offices being elected on something other than classic single first past the post plurality vote.
In Law, procedure counts.
Yes, and there are already a handful of local jurisdictions that use instant runoff voting. I know San Francisco uses it for its mayoral races.
This ruling also doesn’t apply to primaries or to congressional elections (which are not mentioned in the Maine Constitution), although the quotes in the article make it sound like the legislature wants to use the ruling as a pretext to dump the whole thing.