Currently, Maine uses ranked choice voting for both the primary and general elections for our federal delegation and for President of the U.S., but ranked choice voting is only used in the primary elections for state races. Local elections do not use ranked choice voting except in Portland, although Westbrook will be voting in November on whether or not use it.
First-past-the-post, or plurality voting, works well when there are only two candidates because one of them is guaranteed to win with majority support. But three- and four-way races among competitive candidates are common in Maine and can lead to results where the winner fails to receive a majority of the votes cast (50% + 1). Dating back to 1974, the winner has failed to receive a majority vote in 9 of the last 11 gubernatorial elections in Maine. In 5 of those races, the elections were won with less than 40 percent support. Given the frequency with which this was happening in Maine elections, the League of Women Voters of Maine convened a study in 2008 to consider alternative voting systems. That study concluded in 2011 with an endorsement of ranked choice voting as the best way to ensure a majority vote in competitive, single-seat, multi-candidate elections.
Ranked choice voting was first put on Maine’s ballot as Question 5 in the 2016 November election after proponents collected more than 70,000 signatures from across the state. Question 5 passed with 52% of the vote. However, while ranked choice voting was originally intended to apply to all state and federal elections with three or more candidates, an advisory opinion by the Maine Supreme Court in 2017 concluded that RCV conflicted with the plurality language in theMaine State Constitution, which prevented the use of ranked choice voting for legislative and gubernatorial general elections. The Maine Legislature was unable to find a solution to this problem, so legislators passed a bill delaying ranked choice voting.
Supporters of electoral reform collected signatures to place a people’s veto on the ballot in the summer of 2018 to repeal the delaying bill. If passed, it would require ranked choice voting to be maintained. Because placing the people’s veto on the ballot postponed implementation of the delaying law, Maine voters were given the opportunity to vote on whether to preserve ranked choice voting while also using ranked choice voting for several primary races. This people’s veto, called Question 1, was approved by an even greater majority than the original question in 2016.
The Maine Legislature passed a bill in 2019 expanding ranked choice voting to the presidential race, including both the primary and general elections. Because Maine assigns its electoral college votes by congressional district, ranked choice voting may be applied to determine the winner in each congressional district as well as for the state as a whole. A people’s veto campaign was attempted but did not succeed, and ranked choice voting was used in November 2020.
Much of the time, there's a clear winner in the first round of counting, but the 2018 race for U.S. Congress in District 2 went through an RCV count. Here's official information from the Secretary of State. Ranked choice voting was also used in the Democratic primary elections for governor and the 2nd Congressional District representative. Tabulation for these and other races can be found on the Secretary of State’s website.
Find more information about ranked choice voting from the Maine Secretary of State
Read more about the legislative and legal history.
Ranked choice voting lets voters rank their choices based on individual preference. First choices are counted, and if no candidate has a majority of the vote, an "instant runoff" occurs in which the candidate with the least support is eliminated. Voters that picked the eliminated candidate as their first choice have their vote counted for their next choice. In a three-person race, we now have a winner with majority support in the final round of tabulation. In a race with more than three candidates, this process is repeated until one candidate has a majority. Read more about it in RCV Basics.
