Maine voters blew up their voting system and started from scratch
Thanks to the election and reelection of controversial Republican Gov. Paul LePage with less than a majority of the vote, Maine is trying out a whole new method of voting on Tuesday.
Maine is the first state in the nation to use ranked-choice voting (also known as instant-runoff voting) in a statewide election.
It’s largely seen as a rebuttal to LePage, who was elected in 2010 with less than 40 percent of the vote and reelected four years later with less than 50 percent. Besides being known for his obscenity-laced language, the governor has used his power to drag out the implementation of the state’s Medicaid expansion, which passed overwhelmingly on a ballot initiative last year.
Depending on whom you ask, the new method of voting, which allows voters to rank their candidates from favorite to least favorite, is either a push toward a more democratic system or a logistical hellscape.
In ranked voting, if one candidate gets a majority — 50 percent plus 1 — of the vote, they’re declared the winner. But things start to get tricky if no candidate clears the threshold.
That could be especially difficult on Tuesday, when
there are a ton of people on the ballot. In the governor’s race alone, there are seven Democrats and four Republicans lining up to replace LePage, who is term-limited. There will also be ranked-choice voting for the nominees running for Congress in Maine’s Second Congressional District, as well as a state House race.
At the very least, we should expect a later voting night than normal in Maine, which typically would have some of the earliest returns on Election Day.
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