In a Monday advisory opinion, the Maine Supreme Court unanimously determined that legislation aimed at expanding the use of ranked choice voting (RCV) in the state would, “if enacted, violate the Maine Constitution.”
“[T]his decision provides clarity against efforts to pollute our state elections with Ranked-Choice Voting,” Maine Republican Party Chairman Jim Deyermond said in a statement. “This decision should, finally, end the attempts from the radical left to force RCV into Maine’s elections for Governor, Senate, and House.”
As The Federalist has previously reported, RCV is a voting method in which voters “rank” candidates on the ballot. If none of the nominees win a majority in the first round of voting, the candidate in last place is eliminated. His votes go to whichever candidate was ranked second. The process continues until one candidate receives a majority.
Monday’s decision comes weeks after the state legislature asked the court to weigh in on the constitutionality of bill LD 1666, which would expand the voting method in the state to apply to general and special elections for governor, state representative, and state senator. Maine currently uses RCV in primary elections and general elections for federal office.
The justices found that “the proposed legislation would, if enacted, violate the Maine Constitution’s provisions for the election of State Representatives, State Senators, and the Governor by a plurality of all votes.”
As The Federalist has previously reported, Maine’s constitution mandates that these state candidates win an election by a “plurality” of votes. This means securing the highest number of votes when compared to competitors, rather than a majority to win a race.
As Maine’s Democrat Attorney General Aaron Frey argued in a brief to the court last month, RCV undermines elections that only require a “plurality” to win by imposing a method that could ultimately oust a candidate who initially received the most votes.
“The statutory wordsmithing proposed by LD 1666 cannot change the fact that ranked-choice voting is fundamentally a process that requires ‘sequential rounds’ of tabulation … and thus produces an initial plurality winner who can go on to lose in subsequent rounds of tabulation,” Frey wrote in his brief.
Frey argued that RCV “is not the sort of plurality ‘first past the post’ system that the Maine Constitution mandates for the elections at issue here.”
Previously, in 2017, after Maine residents voted for the use of RCV in the state, the court similarly found the use of RCV in gubernatorial and state legislature races would run afoul of the Maine constitution. After the state legislature requested a review of LD 1666, Frey and the RNC both asked the court to uphold its 2017 opinion.
“Because of the Maine Constitution’s language, there are strong and convincing reasons that L.D. 1666 is unconstitutional,” the court’s Monday opinion reads. “Based on the language and structure of the Constitution itself, we conclude that L.D. 1666, like the legislation upon which the Justices opined in 2017, would, if enacted, violate the Maine Constitution.”
The court noted that, while voters “expressed their will, through both their 2016 vote and their elected officials’ passage of L.D. 1666,” to use RCV in the aforementioned state races, its decision was bound to the language in the state constitution. Amending the founding document itself would require a majority of voters and a two-thirds majority from both the state senate and the state house.
