Maine and Oregon Prove the Failure of Ranked Choice Voting

Ranked-choice voting continues to prove itself a failed system of voting that depresses turnout and often elects candidates who come in second place or lower. The Taxpayers Association of Oregon recently noted that in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, thousands of voters didn’t use their RCV ballots correctly, and in one city council race in Portland, Oregon, a third place finisher leapt into first. In the Portland race, it took over 20 rounds of ranked-choice counting to determine the winners.

Six states rejected RCV this election via referendum, and a seventh voted to amend its constitution to ban it. Oregon was one of the six, voting it down 60-40, despite anti-RCV forces being outspent 10,000–1. In 2022, however, voters in Multnomah County—home to far-left Portland—overwhelmingly approved RCV for county chair, commissioners, auditor, and sheriff. Portland voters approved a separate measure, implementing RCV and changing the city’s governing structure. In the new structure, four city districts will each send three candidates to city council, requiring each candidate only to need 25 percent of the vote to make it.

As Restoration News has covered, deep-pocketed liberal mega donors, using dark money nonprofit groups, have funded multi-million dollar astroturfed pro-RCV campaigns, intending to box conservatives out of general elections. Multi-millionaire heiress Katherine Gehl, one of RCV’s biggest backers, began promoting the system after seeing how conservative grassroots groups thwarted former President Barack Obama’s second term agenda by getting their candidates past primaries and forcing general election voters to make a binary choice between conservatives and progressives—which usually resulted in conservative victories.

After Six Years of RCV, Maine Voters Still Don’t Get It

This year, in Maine’s 2nd Congressional race, 12,635 voters did not vote for someone as their first-choice either as a protest vote or because they didn’t understand the process. Incumbent Jared Golden (D) led the Republican challenger Austin Theriault by 2,159 votes after the first count. After four days of counting—including counting the ballots with no first choice selected—Golden’s lead increased to 2,706, putting him over the 50 percent mark. It remains unknown, however, if the voters who left their first choice blank meant to mark their second choices as their first and found the process too confusing to complete their ballots correctly.

According to a joint study by the Maine Policy Institute (MPI) and the Alaska Policy Forum (APF), “in Maine, voter confusion was so pervasive that proponents of ranked-choice voting felt the need to publish a 19-page instruction manual to help voters navigate the process.”

The organizer of the recent RCV repeal effort in Alaska said he got involved in trying to overthrow the system when he saw his grandfather couldn’t figure out how to vote in it.

Princeton professor Nolan McCarty published a study this year, showing RCV harms minority voters. He used data from New York City and Alaska, showing areas with concentrations of minority voters have more ballot exhaustions—a term used to indicate when a voter treats the RCV ballot like a normal ballot and only votes for one candidate—than heavily white areas unless one of their co-ethnics is on the ballot. By not taking advantage of the RCV system, these voters are effectively disenfranchised if neither candidate achieves an outright majority and counting goes to a second round.

The API-MPF study notes that in a country like the US with citizens who are notoriously ignorant about politics it’s impossible to expect them to know enough about all the candidates on a given ballot to rank them. For instance, this year, the question ‘did Biden drop out?’ trended on Google—on Election Day. To avoid being disenfranchised if counting goes to a second round, many of these uninformed voters guess when they rank candidates after their first choice.

Maine liberals pushed for RCV because former Governor Paul LePage (R) won both his terms with a plurality.

When the state adopted it in 2016, the legislature challenged it to the state supreme court because of a clause in the state constitution that says whichever candidate receives a plurality of votes wins. Voters passed a referendum to veto the legislature’s intervention, and RCV went into effect for state primaries and federal races only to avoid violating this clause of their state’s constitution.

Although the constitution prevented RCV from blocking plurality-backed Republican candidates for governor, the strategy worked at overriding the will of the voters in the state’s 2nd Congressional district—the district Donald Trump won in all three of his presidential elections.

In 2018, the first year Maine used RCV, Golden lost the first round of the general election to incumbent Bruce Poliquin (R) by 2,171 votes, 46.3 percent to 45.6 percent. After voters’ second choices were counted, Golden won with 50.6 percent. Each of Golden’s reelection victories came with margins small enough to require a second round of counting, including recently against Theriault, which is currently embroiled in a recount.

In September, former Maine resident Shanon Grimes praised RCV in the Sightline Institute—founded by radical environmentalist Alan Durning—and encouraged residents of her new home state of Oregon to adopt it in last month’s referendum.

 “After LePage, many Mainers wanted a system that would never again elect outlier officeholders supported only by pluralities of voters,” Grimes wrote.

Like the Maine system, the RCV proposed to Oregonians would have adopted RCV without abolishing the partisan primary. This creates a situation in which the two leading candidates usually constituted over 45 percent of the vote when voting went to a second round. This disincentivized people to use RCV correctly and rank candidates like they’re supposed to. Unlike a real run-off, this half-baked form of RCV doesn’t flush out the third-party voters who don’t want to show up to the polls to vote for one of the two finalists.

“Maine’s election administrators have only had to look at second and third-place rankings in a handful of races since implementing ranked choice voting,” wrote Grimes. In 2018, only Golden and Poliquin’s race of the 17 races with more than two candidates were not decided by a majority of first-choice votes. In the Pine Tree State, other than keeping the pro-Trump District 2 in Democratic hands, the closed primary RCV system doesn’t change much. But, as Grimes argues, that doesn’t matter. What matters is RCV makes politicians be nice to each other. After RCV was adopted, two of Maine’s loser gubernatorial candidates even cross-endorsed each other for second choice.

But Maine’s RCV system could one day change more outcomes than its 2nd Congressional race. Maine is still the only somewhat swing state that decides its presidential election by RCV, and a close presidential election could come down to Maine voters’ second-choice preferences. In 2016, Hilary Clinton won it by only 20,000 votes. This year, Kamala Harris won it by less than seven percentage points, and Trump won District 2 by less than 10.

Portland Gets What It Voted For—Good and Hard

In most of Multnomah County, the problem isn’t so much confusion as it is the results RCV naturally produces. Seventy-one percent of voters turned in ballots with at least one RCV race marked versus 75 percent of non-RCV returns, showing a high level of comprehension despite it being the city’s first try at RCV.

Portland’s results mirror McCarty’s socioeconomic findings in New York City and Alaska. In Portland’s City Council District 1, only 55 percent of voters turned in an RCV ballot for at least one RCV race, compared with participation rates that ranged from 74 percent to 77 percent in the other three districts.

In District 1, 67 percent of the voters are white, compared with 72 percent across the city. Only 25 percent of the district’s residents 25 and older has a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 52.5 percent citywide. The median home value is $340,890 versus $523,000 citywide. Sixteen percent of households in the district live below the poverty line, and average household income is $61,000. Citywide, 12 percent live below the poverty line, and the average household income is $86,000.

The high level of RCV participation in most of Portland shows that in a highly educated, high-income area, RCV can work as intended. But that itself is a problem for democracy.

In Portland City Council District 2 race, third-place finisher Sameer Kanal only received 13 percent of first-choice votes, but after over 20 rounds of ranked-choice counts, he ended up in first. The final three candidates in each district win a seat on the City Council, so he could have won a seat even if he finished fourth or fifth in the first round. This is exactly what happened in District 4 where first-round fourth place finisher Eric Zimmerman leapt ahead to win a Council seat after multiple rounds of counting that lasted two weeks.

In Multnomah County, this year’s Measure 117—which would have brought RCV to statewide elections—won 57–43, with a 67 percent turnout. When Multnomah County residents voted 69–31 to approve RCV Measure 26-232 for county-wide elections, in 2022, turnout was 60 percent. Measure 117 even received 16,912 fewer votes in the county than Measure 26-232. This shows at least some county residents either didn’t understand what they were voting for two years ago or have since had a change of mind.

RCV is a disaster. It is a system by and for wealthy, highly educated left-of-center elites. It’s confusing to average voters by design to ensure liberal mega donors save money in the long run in their quest to elect fiscally moderate, socially liberal globalists who will keep politics boring and out of reach of grassroots ideologues—especially conservatives.

Thankfully, most voters recognize it as such despite being heavily propagandized by liberal mega donors. If these “civic-minded” elites actually cared about preventing candidates being elected with only a plurality, they would support the run-off system in which the top two finishers compete head-to-head for an outright majority. But their goal all along was to cripple conservative candidates. They succeed in this by driving down turnout in working-class, conservative areas and ensuring conservative candidates never stand a chance to present their ideas in a head-to-head general election in white collar liberal areas.