Just to clarify–Maine doesn’t have a specific “Independent Party.” King is not a member of any party; he’s a true independent as in “unenrolled in any party.”
It’s fair to say that Mainiacs tend to be more willing to vote for independents than residents of most other states, but I don’t think actual third party candidates (such ad the Libertarians, or the Greens, which I believe in Maine are called the “Independent Greens”) have won any significant offices in the state lately, although i could certainly be wrong.
Also, LePage isn’t the only recent governor of Maine to benefit from votes being split three or more ways. In 2006, for instance, David Baldacci (a Democrat) won with just 38% of the vote. According to Wikipedia, King’s second election, in 1998, was the only one between 1982 and 2018 in which the winning candidate got 50% of the vote. So it’s at least plausible that the IRV system, if followed for the last forty years or so, would have given the state several different governors than they actually had.
bibliophage, thanks for your informative post. I did not know most of that background–very interesting.
To echo a couple of other posters, several states do in effect require 50% for federal offices: states that do (non-instant) runoffs, such as Mississippi (at least in the Senate). I don’t know whether these rules have been challenged in court, but so far as I know Cindy Hyde-Smith has not declared victory based on having won more votes than either Espy or McDaniel on Election Day. Based on that, the claim that requiring 50%+ is “unconstitutional” seems extremely weird.
I’m assuming that Poliquin’s earlier refusal to accept the IRV results has no legal effect, given that IRV is the law in Maine…more for grandstanding purposes than anything else. But if I’m wrong, please tell me.
I’m not a fan of IRV, but it sure does seem like Poliquin doesn’t have much of a case.
Even if he successfuly argues that the law is unconstitutional, why should he get to be seated based on the first preferences? Presumably some number of the third-party voters would have voted differently if they’d known they couldn’t express a second preference. The fair remedy would be to just void the whole election and run it over based on the old rules.
I’m surprised he didn’t attack the initiative process itself (or maybe he did and I missed it). If this case would happen to make it to the Supreme Court, there are four and probably now five justices on the court who think it’s unconstitutional for a state to use an initiative to modify laws governing elections to Congress. The ruling to the contrary (Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission) is only three years old, but maybe they won’t feel bound by it. That seems more likely to succeed than a kooky argument that majoritarian voting systems are unconstitutional (as mentioned, there are already states doing runoffs, just not instant runoffs).
Why didn’t GOP establishment politicians form a united front against Trump during the 2016 primary? Why did Jeb! focus his ad campaign against other mainstream candidates rather than Trump?
Academics sometimes call this a coordination problems. It is endemic with winner-take-all voting aka first-past-the-post voting aka plurality voting. The winner basically depends upon who runs rather than the preferences of the average voter.
Plurality voting is fine if some outside force limits the choices to two. When there are more than 2 candidates (during eg a primary) plurality voting routinely produces bad outcomes.
“Bad outcomes”: other voting systems tend to bunch together: debates about the relative superiority of approval voting vs. instant runoff voting vs. runoff elections are fine tuning. Personally I like approval voting, but I’ll take anything over plurality voting.
It’s hard for millions of people to settle on 1 favorite candidate, even when they agree they hate another guy. We need a voting system that reflects people’s political preferences better. It’s not rocket science: ranked choice has been used in Australia for decades.
There’s also the fact ranked choice voting adds more rounds to the election. As it is now, most people are sick of anything having to do with politics by Election Day. I doubt they’d be that enthusiastic about a system that extends everything out even longer.
A wild idea. Give each person a positive vote and a negative vote. Each person vote totals would be a combination of the two. In a three-way race, say, all the pro-Stein voters would most likely have cast their negative vote against trump. Nah, it would never work.
This ended up how I’d have expected it, despite all the politicization most Trump appointed judges get good marks from the ABA and are sane, rational judges and are going to rule based on our system of laws most of the time; there’s areas of law that judges sometimes have fall on their laps in a case where vague laws and strong partisan politics intercept to let judges basically kinda get out of hand, and in those areas I expect Trump judges to behave as expected, which is where the trouble lies–not in the slam dunk cases like this.
For whatever reason the “runoff election” is somewhat common in the Southeast, and those elections have been ran like that for many decades. So I could not have imagined a court having a problem with an “instant runoff” if they allow a conventional runoff.
But note that if you do this, then if everyone you rank is eliminated you have foregone the option to have a say in which might be the least bad option of those remaining.
You vote one time. You can vote for one, some, or all of the candidates. If you vote for more than one, you rank them in order of your preference. Nowhere do you ‘forego the option’ of having a say. Unless you don’t vote at all.
Your first choice is A. Your second choice is B. You don’t put in a third or fourth choice.
Candidate A is eliminated in the first round, so your vote goes to Candidate B.
Candidate B is eliminated in the second round. So now your vote goes…nowhere.
By not stating a preference between candidates C and D, you are forgoing a voice in determining which of them gets in. Now that may be entirely deliberate on your part–maybe you think they’re equally bad, or you don’t know enough about either of them to rank them–or it may be that you forgot to fill out the end of the ballot, but whatever the reason your vote is not taken into consideration once A and B are both eliminated.
In theory, if enough people vote for only one or two candidates in a crowded field, it can happen that no candidate ever winds up with 50% of the vote. 22% vote for A then B then no one, 21% for B then A then no one, 20% C-D-no one, 19% D-C-no one, 18% for E only. E in eliminated, then D, then B, then C, and that leaves A with just 43% of the vote. Is there a standard way of dealing with this eventuality? In an actual runoff you’d take just the top two candidates, in this case A and B, and then by definition the candidate who wins the runoff has over 50% of the vote, but IRV is done somewhat differently and so this sort of thing is possible. When there are multiple candidates, and a fairly even distribution of first place votes, the system really relies on people expressing preferences a pretty decent way down the ballot.
I believe a “No” vote would just lower the total.
So lets say candidate A gets 1000 votes, B gets 1000 votes, C gets 500 votes, for 2500 votes total. C gets knocked out, and lets say 200 go to A, 100 go to B, and 200 are no votes.
So it’s now 2300 total votes. A has 1200/2300 for 52%
Edit: Actually, looking at the law, Maine makes this simpler. It just says “If there are 2 or fewer continuing candidates, the candidate with the most votes is declared the winner of the election.”
Point taken, and good explanation. My apologies to Gorsnak. I misread his statement about ‘you have foregone the option to have a say in which might be the least bad option of those remaining.’
