For our look at elections: ranked choice voting.
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The 2016 presidential election pitted the two most disliked candidates in the history of public polling against each other. In the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, millions of Americans found themselves forced to vote for a major-party nominee they plainly couldn’t stand or to risk electing the candidate they hated even more by casting their ballot for a third-party contender.
For the first time next November, a slice of the American electorate will have a way out of that lesser-of-two-evils scenario.
With a law set to take effect in 2020, Maine will become the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting for a presidential election—a method in which people list candidates by order of preference rather than bubbling in just one circle. Maine controls only four electoral votes and splits them in half by congressional district, but the change could have huge consequences if the national presidential race to 270 electoral votes is close.
In 2016, Clinton carried Maine by just three points, but she won just less than 48 percent of the vote in the state—a plurality but not a majority. If ranked-choice voting had been in place at the time, it’s possible the state could have gone to Trump. The format works like an instant runoff: If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes, the candidate with the least support is eliminated. Whomever that person’s voters picked as their second choice is then added to the tallies, and the process repeats until one candidate reaches a majority.
Maine’s adoption of ranked-choice voting at the presidential level is the latest boon for an election-reform movement that has gained popularity across the country in recent years. Its proponents hail the method as a way to engage and empower more voters in a highly polarized political environment, while cutting costs in states and municipalities that currently hold runoff elections to ensure that winners secure a majority of the vote. The format played a big role in San Francisco’s high-profile mayoral race last year, and voters in New York City will decide in a ballot referendum this November whether to implement ranked-choice voting in future citywide elections.
