The editorial page editor of the Portland (Maine) Press Herald has this commentary on the May 23 decision of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court on ranked choice voting. The commentary points out the problems that Maine will have in 2018 with no ranked choice voting. It also points out that there appears to be no legal reason why the ranked choice law can’t apply to federal office. Thanks to Rob Richie for the link.
So, essentially the Maine supreme Court gave cover and license to plurality-based pols to ditch the recent political initiative of the voters on less strategic voting without having to make a real accountabl decision.
It is moronic to use RCV for segregated partisan primaries.
It will help maintain barriers to new parties, since they can claim “it is too expensive to run a separate RCV election” for Greens and Libertarians.
Minor parties are far, far better off nominating by convention than by primary.
Who cares about the well-being of minor parties?
You really don’t think it works like this:
Democrats: We care about all parties, we are a party too.
Republicans: We were a 3rd Party once. It should be like in the 1850s.
Do you?
In 2016, the Green Independent party had two legislative primaries. In SD-27, 65 votes were cast in the segregated Green primary. In the general election the Green Independent candidate received 3673 votes, or 56 times as many as in the primary. Under the segregated partisan primary system, it was illegal for many of these voters to express their support for the Green Independent candidate at the ballot box.
The 3673 votes represented 16.7% of the total vote, and was slightly more than the Republican candidate, but the Democratic candidate received over 2/3 of the vote, so it would not have mattered. But the Democratic primary had three candidates, and the Republican primary had one. If all voters had been able to vote for their candidate(s) of choice the outcome may have been different.
In HD-40, there was a three-way Democratic primary. The candidate who prevailed had some extreme baggage. A 21-year employee of the city of Portland making $72,000 per year, had an incident with a parking-lot attendant, which was apparently captured on video. The employee was suspended, and the city spent $6000 investigating. The employee agreed to resign (after collecting her accumulated leave time) and it was never revealed what had happened.
There were also uncontested primaries for the Green and Republican parties, but both nominees did not run in the general election. Had it been legal for independent, Green, and Republican voters to vote in the primary, there is a good chance that the result would have been different.