After the first round was tabulated he had a narrow lead but had secured less than 47 percent of the vote. In November 2018, Poliquin faced Golden and two independents. The process continues until someone has a majority or all ballots are exhausted. If there still isn’t a clear majority, the candidate in last place is again removed, and their supporters’ next-highest ranked choices are added to the vote tallies of the survivors. If not, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and each of their voters’ second choices are added to the tallies of each of the remaining candidates. If a candidate wins a majority of the first-choice votes, the contest is over and that person is declared the winner. Under the system, voters receive a ballot on which they can rank candidates by order of preference. Ranked choice is supposed to eliminate strategic voting and angst over supporting a “spoiler” candidate. It’s been used for Maine’s federal elections ever since, but can’t be used in general elections for state offices because of language in the Maine Constitution adopted after an armed standoff marred the 1879 elections. Maine voters adopted ranked choice voting by a wide margin in 2016 and defended their decision in a second referendum in 2018, which applied a “people’s veto” to a Republican-led law that effectively repealed the original referendum. “Saying you won because you won the ‘constitutional first round vote’ is like losing a game of chess but saying if it was checkers you would have won.” “Any type of government rests to some degree on the population thinking that the government is legitimate, but that’s even more important in a democracy,” he said. Ron Schmidt, professor of political science at the University of Southern Maine, agrees.
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