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Ann Luther is a board member of the League of Women Voters of Maine.
It’s a core principle of democracy: every vote counts. That’s why it was so important to carry out the ranked-choice count in the race for Maine’s Second Congressional District. In this incredibly close election, the League of Women Voters of Maine believes the secretary of state correctly interpreted the law requiring an RCV count.
In our view, ranked-choice voting is good for Maine. It can give voters more meaningful choices and allows candidates from outside the two major parties to compete. It can help create a richer dialogue on issues and increase the diversity of views available for voters to consider. It can eliminate spoiler effects. It allows voters to support their favorite candidate without worrying that they might split their votes and unintentionally help elect the candidate they like the least.
The League believes ranked-choice voting has been good for Maine’s Second Congressional District, where the race has gone to a ranked-choice count the last three times. Races in CD2 have been close for several cycles, and independent candidates in those races in previous years have meant that neither the Democrat nor the Republican held the majority of first-place rankings. Ranked-choice voting lets voters support their favorite candidate without worrying that they might “throw their vote away” or contribute to the election of the candidate that they most oppose.
When the 2024 race was finally called late on Nov. 15, just 0.7 percent separated the two candidates — just over 2,000 votes. People who are in the business of calling these races called it for Jared Golden last week. So the final RCV count was no upset.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have counted all the votes. The official results could only be determined by completing an RCV count. Doing an RCV count is the default in elections where ranked-choice voting is used. When voters are presented with an RCV ballot, the winner should always be determined by an RCV count. Maine allows for one possible shortcut: when one candidate has an insurmountable advantage of first-place rankings such that there is no mathematical possibility of any other candidate catching up, the secretary of state is permitted to declare the winner without a complete RCV tabulation. That happened this year in the race for U.S. Senate that Angus King won outright.
That was not the case in the CD2 race. Voters were presented with an RCV ballot because there were actually three candidates in that race including a declared write-in, Diana Merenda, who ran a low-level campaign in protest of the Israeli-Gaza war. She was able to run without risking a spoiler effect because of RCV. None of the three candidates, not Golden, not Theriault, not Merenda, had an outright majority of all the ballots cast. Some 12,000 ballots had none of those three in the first rank. Those ballots were reported as “blank.”
Election night totals don’t include all of those so-called blank ballots. But those ballots are included in Round 1 of an RCV tabulation.
We can’t know why a voter chose “none of the above” for their first choice. But we can determine their choice among the candidates who are actually running, even if they chose one in the second column.
This race was close enough that those votes could have affected the outcome. It didn’t turn out that way: after the RCV count, Golden actually increased his lead. But we wouldn’t know without looking.
Every vote counts.
RCV is very popular with Maine people, as has been demonstrated in not one, but two state-wide referenda, and as continues to be affirmed in public opinion polling. We hope in the near future to see RCV applied to general elections for state races for governor and the Legislature. We will keep working until every Maine voter is able to fully express their right to vote for the candidates they like the best, without fear of electing the candidate they like the least.
