"A Look At The Legal Issues In Bruce Poliquin's Court Challenge To Ranked-Choice Voting"
"Maine 2nd District incumbent Bruce Poliquin's federal court challenge to ranked-choice voting raised several legal issues with the system. On Tuesday Poliquin filed an injunction and temporary restraining order to halt the count of ranked-choice voting results. Dimitri Bam, associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Maine School of Law, unpacked some of those issues with Maine Public's Morning Edition host Irwin Gratz."
http://www.mainepublic.org/post/look-legal-issues-bruce-poliquins-court-challenge-ranked-choice-voting#stream/0
"Prior court rulings would complicate any challenge to Maine’s ranked-choice voting system
Courts have upheld the voting method on several occasions elsewhere in the United States."
"Though no state has used ranked-choice voting for a federal election before, some states have required a candidate win a majority before taking office, typically relying on special runoff elections between the two front-runners if nobody gets 50 percent or more.
In Mississippi and other Southern states that have runoff elections, overseas ballots have included a ranked-choice option for the general election so any runoff races are not delayed by the required timelines to allow military personnel to vote from faraway locales, Richie said."
https://www.centralmaine.com/2018/11/08/prior-court-rulings-would-complicate-any-challege-to-maines-ranked-choice-voting-system/
True, we can't use it in our Maine state office races for general election, but those bastard law makers were supposed to change the constitution to allow for it. That's what we voted for them to do two times already. There were too many Republicans that didn't want to change it because they like the current system. That's their trick to getting elected. We have essentially 2 or more liberal candidates running and only one conservative. Usually our independents are more liberal. Plurality voting benefits the conservatives in this way. This has been a problem for sometime here, but Paul LePage really got people fed up. We were always able to put with whoever got in before, but he was terrible from day one, just completely unacceptable and what's awful is the majority of Mainers never wanted him to begin with. The majority voted for one of the 4 other candidates. If we had a runoff election between the top two, we would have had Eliot Cutler (I) as governor instead. Cutler was only like 1% behind LePage as it was. Mainers have been pissed about that ever since and LePage has always acted like an asshole, so we never got over it. I know Mainers are not going to give up on this ranked choice thing because this is how we can save ourselves from people like LePage in the future. Democrats and Independents are supportive of ranked choice voting, so hopefully we can make some progress toward changing the Maine constitution with the Democratic majority will have next year. Still going to be hard because I bet there are still just enough Republicans to get in the way. That second article points out that in Lewiston Ben Chin would have been elected as mayor twice if it weren't for the majority requirement the city has. He lost on the run off elections. Ben Chin was the Democrat in the race. I like to point that out to Republicans who seem to think run off elections always benefit the Democrat. They can still win if their candidate is truly more well liked. For the most part, Republicans think they are so right about everything that they feel justified in having unfair advantages.
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