Richard Flowerdew of Falmouth is a certified parliamentarian, a parliamentary expert accredited by the American Institute of Parliamentarians who advises organizations on meeting rules, procedures and bylaws, ensuring fair and orderly proceedings.

The Maine Legislature passed a bill which would adopt the ranked choice voting system for state elections, which is designed to produce a “majority” candidate in elections when there are three or more candidates. However, the Maine Constitution requires a plurality of ballots for a candidate to be elected. What’s the difference?

Governance of the USA is by election. There can only be one winner, even if by the slimmest of margins. A state cannot have two governors; neither can a district have two representative legislators in the event of a tied vote. In a two-person race, the winner will meet both the requirements for a majority and a plurality.

When there are three or more candidates, the chance of the leading candidate receiving a
majority, 50%+1, is significantly diminished. Ranked choice voting was introduced after the 2010 gubernatorial election when Gov. Paul LePage was elected with 37.6% of the vote, Eliot Cutler received 35.9%, Libby Mitchell 18.8% and Shawn Moody 5%. The margin was about 10,000 votes.

Ranked choice voting, RCV, was introduced as a mechanism to enable a wider participation in elections and would produce a “majority” winner. A “majority” of whom?

At this point we need a short description of definitions rules. The first is that election protocols apply equally to all candidates and political parties. There are no special exceptions. The second is that a majority is not synonymous with a mandate. In a 50.1/49.9 majority, there are as many who do not support the candidate as those who do. The wider the majority, e.g., 60/40, the stronger the mandate.

However, the most important element is the difference between a ballot and a vote. Each voter in Maine is entitled to a single ballot, but that ballot may legitimately have several votes.

The two primary arguments for RCV are that it increases the opportunities for individuals to run for election and that it will always produce a “majority” candidate. That first argument is false.

Anyone can run for election as an independent even if they originally ran as affiliated with one of the political parties in the primary. The second is how the majority is determined. In RCV, the winner is determined by excluding the ballots of voters who did not vote for one of the candidates in the final run-off. Those excluded ballots are eliminated or sent to the circular file.

In the USA, the two primary political parties are the Democrats and the Republicans. There are several other parties but none with the magnitude of the Democrats or Republicans. The primaries, which will take place in June, are intended to produce an anointed candidate who will be the beneficiary of the massive financial and media support that elections, especially for the higher offices, generate.

The real goal of RCV is to exclude the “splitters.” These are the candidates who are now
running as an independent, but who may have run as affiliated with one political party in the primary. Note that this applies to all political parties.

When there are three or more legitimate candidates, especially if well known, the chance of an outright majority is significantly reduced. If the goal is to produce a “majority” candidate, the “splitters” must be excluded or otherwise neutralized.

With RCV methodology, voters [ballots] that do not vote for the candidate in the final cut are discarded but the winning candidate may not have the majority of ballots cast.

The mayoral race for Portland [a nonpartisan ballot in 2011 with 14 candidates] clearly illustrates this issue. The winner was Michael Brennan with 8,971 votes, with Ethan Strimling coming in second with 7,138 for a total number of 16,109 ballots. The total number of valid ballots was 19,634. For a true majority of ballots, Brennan would have needed 9,818, which is 847 ballots short. Note that 3,525 ballots were discarded.

However, of interest, if the plurality methodology was in place, Michael Brennan would have won with 26.5 % of all ballots and spared the city of Portland and all its voters the complexity in voting, the administrative work for the tellers, the delay in determining the winner and the costs of RCV.

A similar event occurred in the Portland mayoral election in 2019. Kate Snyder won with 10,460 ballots. There were 18,100 ballots, so she won a majority as well as a plurality, as her winning margin [62%] was so great, but not enough to avoid a run-off, as she had only 39% in the initial cut, not the majority demanded by RCV.

In 2023, Mayor Mark Dion had a plurality on the first cut. However, it took five rounds for him to establish a majority with RCV. Of the approximately 23,000 ballots, about 2000 were eliminated.

LD 1666, the bill I mentioned at the top of this op-ed, tries to equate a “majority” contrived by RSV as to be defined as a “plurality of votes” to meet the requirements of the Maine Constitution. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court must decide whether the Maine Constitution determines that each individual ballot cast in an election should be counted or whether eliminating certain voters/ballots to achieve a political majority is the correct course of action.

Finally, on a more cheerful note, there is another voting system, approval voting, which does help diminish the impact of splitters, includes all the ballots cast, is likely to produce a true majority candidate, is considerably easier to administer than RCV and promptly produces a result.