In the upcoming 2020 U.S. election, Maine votes will be voting under the Ranked choice voting system (the Alternative Voting system in my parlance). This system ensures that to be elected a candidate must have, or accumulate through vote transfers, the support of the majority of the votes cast in a district.
Maine law provided that all state and federal primary elections, and federal general elections, are conducted by ranked choice voting. But opposition has pushed its total implementation into the future.
On November 8, 2016, Maine's Question 5, the Ranked Choice Voting Act, passed with 52 percent support.
The law states that all primary and general elections for Maine's governor, state legislature, and federal congressional offices would be conducted by ranked choice voting.
Opponents circulated a veto referendum petition to force the question of RCV for presidential primary and general elections on the 2020 ballot and to suspend its implementation in that regard until the outcome of that vote. But the petition was found to be inadequate to force such a vote. So Alternative Voting will be used for at least a part of the election of the next U.S. president.
It was used in the 2018 midterm election of Maine's congressmen, where it made a difference. This was the first time a congressman has been elected through Alternative Voting in U.S. history.
In Maine's second congressional district, no candidate took a majority of votes in the first count. The Republican candidates (the incumbent running for re-election) and the Democrat were about even at 46 percent each. The eight percent held by the two less popular candidates held the election in the balance.
Hinting at the changes that could be wrought by this system if used more generally, the leader in the first count did not win in the end as the Democrat candidate's wider general appeal gave him enough votes to have majority of votes in the congressional district.
The Republican candidate who lead in the first count, challenged the outcome saying it breaks the "one person one vote" basis of U.S. elections. He obviously does not see that each voter did cast only one vote , but that in the case of the smaller parties which had 8 percent of the votes, instead of the votes being wasted when their candidates were not elected, were moved elsewhere to be used there.
I wonder if that defeated candidate has considered that the "one person one vote" rule could also be held against FPTP. In that Maine election, without Alternative Voting, the 8 percent of the voters would have been in a situation of "one person no vote."
Though in Maine I don't get why election staff scanned and downloaded all of the nearly 290,000 ballots. They could have simply looked at the back-up preferences of the votes marked for the small parties and moved them to the marked second preference. The 92 percent of the vote marked for he Democrat and Republican candidates was going nowhere.
If the votes marked for each candidate were sorted into piles in the initial count, then the vote transfers required under AV would have required relatively little work.
Work could have been reduced if only the 23,000 Independent votes were examined for back-up preferences. They were the only ones being transferred.
The two Independent candidate were eliminated and their votes transferred in one count because the third place candidate was so far behind the second that there was no way the order of candidate would change after just the lowest-ranking candidate's elimination.
When they were examined, it was found that one third were exhausted - no back-up preferences were marked or only one back-up preference marked and that was for the other Independent candidate. Of the remainder, two-thirds went to the Democrat and one-third to the Republican. The net increase of 5000 votes to the Democrat was enough to make him the leader, and give him a majority of the votes - and the seat.
This was first time an incumbent had been deposed in Maine since the early 1900s.
Looking at recent elections in District 2,
the winner in 2016 had a majority of the vote;
the winner in 2014 won with only 47 percent of the vote. The majority of voters in the district were not represented by the elected Representative. 11 percent went to "other" candidates. These votes, if they had been transferred under Alternative Voting, might have made the Republican (47 percent of the vote) or the Democrat (41 percent of the vote) the proper winner.
Even if not proportional, Alternative Voting assures majority rule, which FPTP does not.
Thanks for reading.
(See my blog "list of Montopedia blogs concerning electoral reform" to find other blogs on this important subject.)
========================================
Comments