On June 21, the Maine Senate tabled LD 1625, the bill to repeal the Ranked Choice Voting initiative passed by the voters in November 2016. The Senate also gave preliminary approval to LD 1624, which would begin the process of amending the state constitution to allow ranked choice voting.
On June 22, the Maine House took similar action. See this story, which was written before the House had acted. Generally, the votes were by voice vote, so there is no tally of “ayes” and “nays.”
This is another disaster by “FairVote” and all the supporters of RCV in single-winner districts which is certain to do damage to third parties and independents, exactly like what has happened in SF and Oakland, California.
By coincidence, I brought the correct formula for the United Coalition in 1993/94 to the house of Richard Winger of BAN.
He, along with Cameron Spitzer, Jim Lindsay and others, have made sure that the incorrect math is being used.
Not one which attract team players and cooperation, but single-winner districts, which attract egomaniacs like the Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump-like egotists.
These are the types of party bosses elected under pluralist elections who cannot enjoin a true pure proportional representation system. Not only because they do not know the math, but also by the very nature by which they do their political business.
And every elected member of the Maine legislature is elected under plurality elections, so they likely also like the single-winner elections under RCV.
But in the long run this is very bad for proportionality if they implement single-district RCV in Maine.
I have repeatedly try to educate Richard Winger now for more than 23 years and his reply has always been; :I don’t understand and I am not interested.”
Instead, Richard Winger, has used this rag to torpedo our work every time, since 1993 when I first spoke about this at his house as a candidate for Gov of California.
The founders of Google joined with Spitzer, Winger and Takenaga, and by copying our programs, our logo, etc., they were part of the process for destroying the potential for pure proportional representation and for delaying progress for more than two decades.
Remember, in 2014, when top-two was passed by a majority of voters?
Instead of applauding a very small step forward for voting reform in California, instead of working with the United Coalition’s candidates for public office, we got law suits and enormous amounts of time and money spent fighting (top two).
But in 2014, we at the United Coalition of Candidates, were working to find people interested in unity.
http://international-parliament.org/ucc-2014.html
Year after year, pluralists can only give you more fights, more division, more polarization. Only under pure proportional representation can fair treatment across the board be expected, in all facets of elections; from ballot access, equal free speech time, equal treatment and equal election thresholds which always elect a team of candidates who were elected with the same standard predictable percentages year after year in perfection.
Top-two, Prop. 14, was passed in June 2010. Only 2,868,945 people voted for it. At the time there were 16,977,031 registered voters, so it only got 16.9% support from the registered voters. And it wouldn’t even have passed if it hadn’t been described on the ballot as “Increases voter participation in primaries.” Nothing was said on the ballot about the shrinking of voter choice in the election itself.
The ballot title for Proposition 14 was:
ELECTIONS. INCREASES RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN PRIMARY ELECTIONS.
Proposition 14 was passed in all but 3 counties.
Surprisingly, they fixed the badly flawed constitutional amendment. Maybe they read my comment on BAN.
The original version would have simply replaced “plurality” with “majority”. The problem is that the current constitution provides for the process of counting ballots in each town, then forwarding the totals to the SOS, who would declare the winner to be the candidate with the plurality of the vote.
The proposed amendment would have required the winner to have a majority, which would take Maine back to the 1840s, when if no candidate received a majority, they would simply hold a new election in a couple of months. Sometimes this would go on for the whole term, as no candidate would give way.
One amendment would have stripped out all the current language, and put RCV into the constitution. This is quite inflexible. It failed to advance on a 17:17 tie vote.
The second amendment strips out all the current language, and simply says that legislators and the governor will be elected as provided for by statute.