Joshua Dunlap, an attorney from Pierce Atwood, left, and Jason Savage, Maine Republican Party executive director, talk to reporters about the ranked choice voting lawsuit at the Maine Republican Party convention. (Joe Phelan/Morning Sentinel)
AUGUSTA – The Maine Republican Party announced Friday it was filing a lawsuit in federal court in its latest effort to stop the use of ranked-choice voting in the primary elections on June 12.
The announcement came shortly after delegates at the party’s biannual convention voted unanimously to change the party’s platform rules to say they preferred using a plurality vote in their primary.
The suit, filed in federal court in Bangor, is seeking a quick injunction against Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap that would prohibit him from proceeding with a retabulation of ballots, as called for under the voter-approved ranked choice voting law, if a candidate does not win a majority in the first count of ballots by local election officials.
“The first round of counting would happen as it always has at the local municipal level and so we are requesting the counting then stop after that first round,” said Joshua Dunlap, an attorney with Pierce Atwood, who filed the suit for the Maine Republican Party. He said the suit is based on federal precedent which established that political parties, as associations, have 1st Amendment Rights and the way they choose their nominees for office is protected under the U.S. Constitution.
“We feel the case law and precedent are clear, and that forcing Republicans to change the way we nominate our candidates is a clear violation of our First Amendment rights,” said Jason Savage, the executive director of the Maine Republican Party. “We hope the court will expedite our request and act quickly to protect our right to select our nominee the way we choose.”
Under Maine’s traditional voting system, the candidate who gets the highest vote total is declared winner, even if that is less than 50 percent in a race with three or more contestants.
In the ranked-choice system, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no one wins a clear majority – more than 50 percent of the vote – after the first count, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters who chose the eliminated candidate would have their ballots added to the totals of their second-ranked candidates, and the ballots would be retabulated. The process continues until one candidate has a clear majority and is declared the winner.
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