| Anna Kellar, John Palmer | The Portland Press Herald |
Maine’s framers understood that a majority outcome mattered. When the state’s constitution was ratified in 1820, it required governors to win a majority of the popular vote. If no one did, the Legislature would step in — but as a last resort. Majority rule was the point.
Fast-forward to modern Maine, and the cost of that change is obvious. Since the 1970s, the state has elected governors five times with less than 40% of the vote. In those races, more than 60% of voters chose someone else. It became a recurring legitimacy problem. And Mainers noticed.
In 2016, they did something about it. By a clear statewide vote, Mainers approved ranked choice voting. The logic was simple: let voters express their real preferences, eliminate the spoiler effect and ensure winners earn majority support. In other words, restore — using modern tools — the same principle Maine’s constitutional framers had insisted on two centuries earlier.
Voters understand it
So today, Maine uses ranked choice voting in primaries for state offices, and in both primaries and general elections for Congress, for president (under a separate statute) and for many municipal offices in Portland and Westbrook. It works well and voters understand it. But it is not yet in place for the office where the original problem was most obvious.
Finishing the implementation of ranked choice voting is easy. The law is already on the books. The method already works smoothly in Maine’s primaries and congressional elections. And courts elsewhere, most notably Alaska’s Supreme Court, have clarified that ranked-choice voting is a single election with a single decisive count — not a series of separate contests, as Maine’s high court suggested in its advisory opinion.