Maine voters can vote to change how they vote

Maine residents can vote for more than just the next president.

(Image credit: iStockphoto)

published 8 November 2016

Yo dawg, Maine heard you like voting so it put a voting initiative on your ballot so you can vote while you vote — which is to say, Maine's Question 5 asks voters to consider switching to a ranked voting system for state and federal offices in future elections.

If approved, ranked voting would give third-party and independent candidates a far more meaningful shot at election. Reason's Scott Shackford explains:

Ranked-choice voting asks voters to order their candidates by preference, not just pick a single vote. Who is your first choice? Who is your second choice? And so on, in races where there are more than two candidates. In order to win a ranked choice race, the top candidate must earn a majority of the votes cast. If he or she only has a plurality in the first round, the candidate with the least amount of votes is tossed from the race. The ballots are then counted again, but in situations where voters selected the least popular candidate as their first choice, their second choice is now counted. This all goes on until a candidate gets a majority of the vote, which may not actually be the same person who won the first round. [Reason]

So when — as in 2016 — you have two unpopular, polarizing major party candidates, ranked voting could well lead to a third option like Gary Johnson, Evan McMullin, or Jill Stein taking the state. As Shackford notes, "It's easy to imagine Johnson becoming the second choice for a good chunk of voters, and then imagine what could happen next if neither Clinton nor Trump gets 51 percent of the majority vote."

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If Question 5 passes, Maine would be the first state in the union to move away from first-past-the-post voting, the simple majoritarian system we have now. Some American cities have already adopted ranked voting.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.