Posted on 11/13/2018 8:19:41 AM PST by yesthatjallen
Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-Maine) is among a group suing Maine over its new voting system, which prevented him from being declared the winner in his reelection bid last week.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Poliquin filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction to stop the state from using its new ranked-choice voting method to determine the winner in his race with Democrat Jared Golden.
Poliquin believes he should be declared the winner of the race because he received the most first-place votes, but under the new voting system, additional rounds are required because neither he nor Golden won a majority of the votes.
The new voting system allows voters to rank candidates from first to last. After the second choices of voters are counted, it's possible Poliquin could be trailing Golden.
Maine's secretary of state has said he won't stop the second round of voting despite Poliquin's lawsuit, according to the AP.
This is the same system that put two Democrats and no Republicans on the ballot for US Senator in California.
I hope Bruce pulls this out. However I have a question, does the House have the final say as to who it’s members are? If Golden’s ahead after rank choice round 2 0r 3, I can see the Dems seating him, even if the courts rule for Poliquin.
From The National Conference on State Legislatures: ALTERNATIVE VOTING SYSTEMS, October 20, 2017 (who knew there was such an organization?):
Given that it is facing challenges in Maine Supreme Judicial Court and Maine Constitutional questions, I'm surprised they went ahead with it. You KNOW Democrats would be screaming Holy Hell if they were in a position to lose and the issue was up for consideration by the State Supreme Court.Some states use runoff elections for primaries; one state, Alabama, uses instant runoff elections, aka ranked choice voting, for its uniformed and overseas citizen absentee voters (UOCAVA) voters. Read Alabama's explanation of the state's process, and see NCSL’s webpage on primary runoffs.
Maine is the only state in the country to have established the use of ranked-choice voting for all congressional and state elections. The state adopted a citizens’ initiative in November 2016 to move the state toward a system of ranked-choice voting for elections for U.S. Senate, U.S. House, Governor, State Senator and State Representative starting in 2018. The measure was challenged in court, however, and in May 2017 the Maine Supreme Judicial Court found that parts of it violated the state constitution. The Maine Constitution calls for some candidates to be selected by plurality, rather than ranked according to preference. It remains to be seen whether the legislature will amend the constitution, or to repeal the ranked choice voting measure, or use it for some offices and not others.
Many large cities in the U.S. use ranked-choice voting including St. Paul, Minn., Portland, Maine and four cities in the Bay Area of California. Some cities, such as Cambridge, Mass., and Minneapolis, Minn., use ranked-choice voting in multimember districts. In these cases, the percentage of the vote needed to win a seat declines in relation to the number of seats to be elected.
Also known as "preferential voting," ranked choice voting is widely used in private associations, including more than 50 American colleges and for political party elections.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
One can vote for protest candidates but still exclude a ‘tard from a major Party.
Apparently the underling problem is that the voting peeps want an eventually fascist, socialist free stuff gov’t.
Quasi obviously the fault of Public Education and >50% of the kid parents.
To survive, the GOPee is going to have to go Conservative and spend lotsa campaign money educating the public otherwise.
Urged along by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, voters approved a top-two primary system in 2010. In many ways, the change was liberating: Voters of all persuasions choose from a single list of candidates, no matter the party. The two who receive the most votes, even if they are from the same party, move on to the general election in November.Schwarzenegger boasted at the time that the new system "would change the political landscape in California, finally giving the voters the power to hold politicians truly accountable."
The idea of the top two primary was to encourage more moderate candidates by getting rid of party primaries that supposedly produced extreme candidates. But using the top two primary to achieve the goal requires a level of knowledge and strategic coordination among voters that was never feasible. The best assessments are that top two has produced far more confusion than moderation, including the dubious tactic of parties running “loser” candidates under the opposing party’s label. Primary turnout has only fallen.
"Encourage more moderate candidates" - what an absolute farce. We got TWO radical leftist candidates for Senator and, as you say, NO REPUBLICANS. My State of California is so absolutely fouled up we bought a second home in Idaho. Maybe the liberal disease can be kept at bay there for my remaining years.
They took over education and have indoctrinated at least two generations of Americans. We are truly f@#%ked.
If Democrats can win an election with method 2, they demand we use method 2.
Where is this a whole lot different than a run-off if neither candidate gets over 50%? The fact of the matter is that states can run their own elections and there is nothing illegal about ranked choice.
It’s a little different. The California system is a “jungle primary” where the top to finishers in the primary go on to face each other in the general.
This is something called “Instant Runoff Voting.” If no one gets 50%, then they use the 2nd and 3rd choices of the voters to push one candidate to 50%.
Here’s how it works.
Let’s say that we have 4 candidates with the following vote totals.
R 1000 - 44%
D 950 - 42%
I 200 - 8%
G 100 - 4%
Total: 2250
No one gets to 50% in this scenario. In a traditional system. R wins with 44% of the vote.
In the IRV system, voters vote for their “first choice” as well as their “second choice.”
If no one reaches 50%, the person with the least number of votes is eliminated, and a computer program allocates those voter’s “second choice” to the remaining candidates.
In the above example, let’s say that all of G’s voters second choice was “D”. Now we have
R 1000 - 44%
D 1050 - 46%
I 200 - 8%
Total: 2250
Still no one has 50%, so we do it all again with I’s voters. Let’s say that those voters were evenly split between D/R.
Now we have
R 1100
D 1150
Since only two candidates are left, we now 50%+
D wins.
That’s exactly what happened here in Maine.
R has the plurality after the first vote, but the two independents running are left-wing nuts and their voters presumably allocated the “D” as their second choice.
And we are under the illusion that we still have a democratic voting system because?
At least Maine formalized this. In other parts of the country they now, evidently, allocate the majority of newly filled out post election ballots to the D.
WOW!
The secretary of state has declared Golden the winner. Bleep rank choice, bleep the GOP in Maine. I’ve got to find out when the next state GOP meeting is. I think they choose their officers in January. We need a whole new executive team, and new field operatives at Higgins street to put together a two year operation to take back this state fro the progressives.
The Ethan Strimling Consolation Prize.
He didn’t get to be governor and he foisted this mess on to us.
I just voted for my choice in each race and ignored the rest of the ballot.
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