Maine’s colorful governor, Republican Paul LePage, has once again grabbed headlines — this time for leaving a profanity-laced voicemail for an opposition lawmaker and then declaring that the “overwhelming majority” of Maine’s “enemy” are “people of color.”
LePage’s antics have left many people outside Maine wondering how the bland, sensible state ever elected him. The answer’s straightforward: LePage has never needed a majority of Maine’s votes to win. Maine has a standard first-past-the-post voting system plus a strong tradition of third parties and politicians running as independents. With multiple candidates running against LePage during his two races for governor, he was able to squeak into office both times with just a plurality of votes.
In 2010, LePage was elected with just 37.6 percent of the vote. In 2014, he received 48.2 percent of the vote. In each election, a combination of independent and Democratic Party candidates received the majority of the votes.
But everything about Maine politics may change this November. Partly in reaction to LePage’s victories, activists have put Question 5 on the ballot, an initiative that would create what is called a “ranked choice” or “instant runoff” voting system for all state-level races. If Maine votes yes on Question 5, it would mean that no one could be elected to state-level office in Maine — meaning governor, U.S. senator and representative, and state senator and representative — without the support of a majority of voters.
Here’s how the ranked choice system works:
• Voters do not choose just one candidate for each office. Instead, they rank everyone running, from their top preference to their lowest.
• If a candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, he or she wins.
• If no one receives a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate who received the fewest first-choice votes is removed from the contest. Then all of that candidate’s second-choice votes are distributed among candidates remaining in the process.
• If one of the remaining candidates get a majority of votes, he or she wins. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is again eliminated, and the process continues until someone does have a majority.
In 2014, the city of Minneapolis used this system. Watch the video below, put together by Minneapolis Public Radio, explaining how it works:
One of the main attractions of ranked choice voting is that it allows candidates from third parties to run in elections without acting as spoilers for a voters’ second choice candidate.
“It’s time for a better election system. It’s time for ranked choice voting,” Maine Democratic Rep. Diane Russell wrote prior to the 2014 election. “You can actively champion your favorite person without ensuring the electorate’s least-favorite candidate wins.”
At least 10 U.S. cities currently use ranked choice voting, as well as some locations overseas, including London.
In London’s recent mayoral election, the Labor Party candidate Sadiq Khan and Conservative Zac Goldsmith came in first and second, respectively, but neither received a majority of first-preference votes in a twelve-candidate field. The Green Party candidate, whose voters were far likelier to prefer Khan to Goldsmith, came in third. Thanks to the ranking system, once second-choice preferences were accounted for, Khan was elected mayor with a majority of votes – even as voters had been able to seriously consider smaller parties without worrying that their vote would be wasted or would help elect the candidate they liked least.
Opponents of Question 5 have argued that the system’s complexity would be “confusing and difficult” for voters, as Maine Republican State Rep. Heather Sirocki argued in an op-ed last March. Indeed, the system does involve a longer process that requires more complex decision-making.
When San Francisco adopted the system, some voters were simply putting the same candidate as their first, second, and third choice. If Question 5 does pass, it would be up to Maine’s government to properly inform voters about how to utilize the new system, so that they can take full advantage of the benefits it provides.
Maine governors can serve a maximum of two consecutive terms, so LePage cannot run again in 2018. However, he has floated the idea of running for the Senate instead that year. He could also sit out four years and run for governor again in 2022. But if Question 5 passes this fall, what he won’t be able to do is win an election simply by appealing to a fervent minority.
Top photo: Gov. Paul LePage after winning a second term, Nov. 4, 2014, in Lewiston, Maine.
Confusing and difficult? Anyone who can’t understand how to use ranked-choice voting after a basic explanation shouldn’t be voting. This is ten-year-old stuff, nothing more. The “confusing and difficult” BS is just a propagandistic claim to oppose this more representative method of counting votes.
“Confusing and difficult” is the standard response from those who benefit from first-past-the-post, and from those who wish to be favoured by them. It’s insulting and condescending.
Known as “Proportional representation by single transferable vote”, this proposed system has been in use in Ireland since the late ’30s for all it’s elections, even the presidential elections. No one has a problem with it.
what’s so bad about LePage? he doesn’t seem to have much power. sure, he runs his mouth. but pay a guy $70,000 to be chief executive of a state with 1.2M population and that’s kind of what you get. gov’s wife works as a waitress so she can afford the Toyota Rav4 her mom bequeathed to her when she died. maybe having a bumbling, small-town loudmouth instead of a puissant, cold-eyed politician is what our system needs.
“Indeed, the system does involve a longer process that requires more complex decision-making.”
It means voters have to throw more than one dart to mark their ballots. Democracy is worth the extra effort.
We call it preference voting in Australia. Yes it leads to a longer count (especially in our Senate), but it is a much better system than the common US system.
It does mean that the primaries would become a little less important, and would allow more (and possibly better) candidates apply without the fear that they will ‘split the vote’.
The next thing to do would be to look at a implementing a major overhaul of of electoral boundaries and (to the horror of ‘smaller government’ types) an independent agency who draw up and run the election in each state following a charter that requires them to attempt to draw boundaries based on geographically centered population numbers.
The funny thing about this all is that Bernie Sanders crushed HRC in this states primary. Wonder how rank choice would help Bernie Get in the WH?
How bout we just write him in, in November!!
I thought we were hacking everybody. Rather, its everybody else hacking us. This is plain incompetence. We have rewarded our second rate hackers (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs), but locked up or destroyed the lives of our best (Aaron Schwartz, Garret Brown, Edward Snowden).
Michael Hayden and Mike Morrell are responsible for this. Rest assured they will be held accountable after the elections. Supporting Crooked Hillary isn’t going to help them in any way.
Time to go, Clappers and Comeys …. pack up!
If the USA had such a system for presidential elections in 1992, H Bush would have been elected and not Bill Clinton with 40% (I know electoral college).
Most presidential elections people are voting for the lesser of evils. We would still get evil, Republican or Democrat.
We have to take money out of campaigns. Money is NOT speech!
Money is not speech, but the speech it buys has First Amendment protection. The worst thing about the Citizens United decision is that the SC got it technically right.
You want to eliminate people like the Koch brothers? Then eliminate people like the Koch brothers. Put a cap on wealth, correct the massive inequality in America, and no one will be left who can buy elections with their pocket change. That’s how you fix CU.
The problem is not the $$$. It’s the inability to absorb information and to think and to question in a critical manner. Teach people how to listen, including to the unspoken words during the silence, to read, including between the lines, and to ask critical questions, and $$$ won’t mean squat. However the duopoly and the interests it serves does not want an educate and informed public.
Contemporaneous polling suggests Perot drew more from Clinton than Bush.
“We have pre-election polls and exit polling to make an assessment of what impact Perot actually had on the outcome. In a three-way match-up nationally, in early June 1992, Perot led with 39%, Bush was second with 31%, while Bill Clinton trailed with 25%, according to Gallup. Perot exited the race during the Democratic convention in mid-July. In the immediate aftermath of the convention, Gallup had Clinton leading Bush 56% to 34%, clearly a post-convention bounce. But a month later, Clinton still led — by between 17 and 25 points — in half a dozen national media polls, with President Bush not exceeding 37% of the vote in any of them. In mid-September, with Perot still out of the race, an ABC News/Washington Post poll gave Clinton a commanding 58%, with the incumbent still stuck at a very familiar 37%.
Then, on October 1st, Perot re-entered the race. An October 8-11 poll — done by the Times Mirror Center for The People & The Press, directed by the outstanding Andrew Kohut — found that Clinton had dropped to 48%, with Bush at 35%, and Perot at 8% (in mid-September, they had found Clinton leading Bush 53%-38%). An October 20-22 follow-up poll of the same 1,153 voters surveyed earlier in the month found that Clinton had slipped to 44%, while Bush held at 34%, and Perot had jumped to 19%. The very first sentence of the extensive press release, dated October 26, 1992, noted that, “Ross Perot’s surge in the polls is drawing somewhat more support from Bill Clinton than from George Bush, and the third party candidate seems poised to make more gains that might further narrow Bill Clinton’s nationwide margin.” That press release came out the same morning that Perot’s bizarre charges that Republicans had conspired to ruin his daughter’s wedding floated into the general political consciousness, and that was the end of the Perot surge. Nonetheless, he still drew 19% on Election Day, to Clinton’s 43% and Bush’s 37.5%.”
http://www.pollingreport.com/hibbitts1202.htm
If none of the above wins Maniacs are once again Massholes.
We’re not bland! haha
I thought Paul LePage was a wild and crazy guy. And he is. But he is also right – as in correct. D-money, Fleezy, Sneezy and Wheezie….. that’s for real. I met these types. I know how they operate. It’s a culture. And it’s really bad. It’s a disease that spread, now it’s huge, and it gets people killed walking down the street. It’s bad for America.
These “kids” are a product of the operating environment bestowed upon them by some other nickname characters.. Shitty Mitty, Big Dog, Blankie Fineguy, Dumya, Dickless, and Hussein.
Crooked Hellary wants the reins to “take her shot”. She aint the answer- she’s the problem.
I would solve some problems….
1. screw imports, we make everything here, import only what materials we dont have.
2. the ceo’s who farm out for profits? strip them of their assets and toss them into prison for 10 years.
3. elected persons who fostered America’s destruction? stripped of assets and 10 years in prison.
4. gang affiliated? prison. time unspecified. earn your way out with education or other talent.
5. illegal? outta here.
6. NO MORE IMMIGRATION. CANCELED. KAPUT.
7. elected and appointed persons violating the will of the majority or the constitution of DOI… stripped.
8. All of America rebuilt by and funded by monies deducted from military. Also cutting all officer pensions 50% and salaries 50%.
9. All military contracts rescinded and placed at public auction.
10. All industries for life support and a 51% + marketshare be nationalised.
11. FIRE THE FED. All currency grounded to silver. NO MORE CREDIT PRINTING. (market prices will collapse to the point of common affordability. no more borrow to but bonds or stocks)
12. wealth – tax the holy shit out of it.
Own your currency to Own your country to Own your destiny.
Congratulations on the most asinine reply I have seen in years. Number one alone is from someone who simply doesn’t enjoy or understand the modern world.
screw imports
and i understand far more than yourself
you are free to leave my country
No, he was right. Your entire reply was garbage. Pseudo intellectual nonsense written by either a supervillain or a moron. Or perhaps both
You have announced you oppose our country’s concept of democracy and right to dissent in your idea that it is “my country” instead of accepting it is ‘OUR’ country. Authoritarians like in N. Korea are the ones that think individuals can oust anyone who disagrees. So maybe you do understand words, but you are woefully lacking in conceptual understanding.
Your “modern world” is destroying the Earth and societies. People like you are the problem.
YOU READ MY MIND!
Barabbas for president. I’ll write you in.
that gives me an idea.
By the same runoff bubble choice, the third party is just clicks away.
“Grounded to silver”? That means like literally every developed country in the world would own us and separate us… piece by piece… we don’t have much silver, buddy. Furthermore, there are serious consequences for the way a country treats it’s criminals (even the guilty). The world is bigger than the U.S. How about increasing access to higher education so the CITIZENS of these united states have a tangible and accessible alternative to crime. Keep in mind: we all start as CITIZENS. We, as CITIZENS, ARE RESPONSIBLE for our fellow CITIZENS, our CONSTITUENTS. The problem with people like Paul LePage is, he thinks and breathes division. And he’s too willing to see other AMERICANS as the “OTHER”. When your focus is division you will only seek more division and not real solutions. The #1 cause of crime is a loss of hope. When you feel that you’ve fallen (or started off) too far behind, you give up. But LePage knows this but purposely ignores it. Love and understanding is the beginning.
So by “solve some problems” you mean repeal the Constitution in entirety.
Hey, that’s nuts, but it’s not any more nuts than most of the other policies I’ve heard. At least he’s not proposing to change the tax rate on the poor from 10% to 13% in order to ensure that people can inherit more than $2 million without paying any taxes at all … unlike another candidate in the race. And if he wants his enemy officials locked up, well … the Republicans already want that with Clinton. And Trump wants it with the reporters who oppose him. You can knock this guy, but at least he’s after the officials who “destroyed this country”, not the one who wanted private email.
The existence of ranked choice voting exposes the lie that third party candidates are spoilers. If the major parties were motivated by anything other than needing base fear tactics and scapegoats, they would have already implemented this.
Most notably, this applies to Democretins. If they really believed their candidate could win on their merits, then they should have been pushing this idea since 2000. Their refusal to do so makes it clear that they are the spoilers that prevent the candidates who promote policies that people actually want from getting elected.
To be even more blunt, the Democretins know that, stripped of the ability to run entirely on “fear of the other”, that Hitlery would not be able to win (without vote hacking), because, without the fear of the “other” being the main motivating factor, people would vote for the greater good, rather than the “lesser evil” (who is, in fact, just the More Effective Evil, though low-information voters have not been spoonfed the extent of that evil by the War Profiteers that own the media, and who predictably refrain from citicizing the candidate that they have been assured is more likely to provide them the most blood money.)
Most notably, this applies to Democretins. […]
To be even more blunt, the Democretins know that, stripped of the ability to run entirely on “fear of the other”, that Hitlery would not be able to win (without vote hacking),
I am no fan of the democratic party but it’s just silly to point to them as “most notable” regarding this tactic. Remember Willie Horton? And Trump is the candidate that’s been calling Mexicans rapists, so, yeah, no “fear of other” tactic there. :-s
The lack of push for this tactic from either of the major parties is no mistake. It would demonstrably reduce their power over the electorate. That’s not something either one of them wants. The republicans don’t even have proportional representation in their primaries – they are first past the post, winner take all – so they’ve got, perhaps, even less to brag about in this respect.
Re: vote hacking (and/or voter suppression), as someone who had an up close look at the shit show that happened in Ohio in 2004 – I was part of Fitrakis’ exit polling data team compiling real time results – I can guarantee that that is also not a new phenomenon.
http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2011/4239
The best thing that could happen next to instant run-off voting would be open audits of all voting machine systems by independent auditors. I doubt you’ll find support for that from either side of the aisle either.
Republicans are no better. Obviously, as the two Maines parties, they both would tremendously loose from ranked choice. The small group of people at the head of DCN/GOP would not be able highly influence the selection of candidate. In a ranked choice, Bernie could still be president, no matter how much the DNC would do to shoot him in the back.
Another thing I like about the Ranked Choice/Instant Runoff system is that it allows voters to ‘vote’ a hated candidate dead-last.