Maine voters can vote to change how they vote
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:
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.
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