Maine law still requires RCV in June primaries
Source: FairVote
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Update: On March 30, Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap appeared as a guest on Newsradio WGAN, and during the interview he said that Maine's June primary elections would use ranked choice voting, unless ordered otherwise by a court.
The story of ranked choice voting in Maine has been at once inspiring and frustrating. Inspiring, because the people voted, in historic numbers, to adopt ranked choice voting for their state and federal offices. Frustrating, because a series of efforts, each more convoluted than the last, have been taken to deny Mainers what they voted for. Today, that twisted path takes another turn, but we fully expect to see ranked choice voting used for the first time in Maine's June primaries this year.
For background: Question 5 passed with over 52 percent support in November, 2016, adopting ranked choice voting for primary and general elections for congressional offices, state legislative offices, and governor. It won with the second-greatest number of votes in the history of initiatives in Maine. Concerns were raised that Maine constitutional provisions requiring the election of governor and both houses of state legislature by a "plurality" of votes cast might make the new law inapplicable to those elections. The Maine Senate used a process colloquially referred to as a "solemn occasion" to ask the Maine Supreme Court for its non-binding opinion on the issue, and the Maine Supreme Court opined that there was indeed a conflict and so RCV could not be used for general elections for governor and state legislature.
The Maine state legislature then used that non-binding advisory opinion as pretext for a law that would delay the implementation of ranked choice voting for two election cycles, at which point it would be automatically repealed unless the Constitution were amended - effectively, this was a repeal, as amending the Maine constitution requires supermajority votes in the closely divided state legislature. The people of Maine then fought back - they gathered signatures to undo the new "delay-and-repeal" law with a "people's veto," while keeping the parts of the delay-and-repeal law that apply to the offices affected by the Supreme Court decision: general elections for governor and state legislature. After it was confirmed that they had gathered enough signatures, the delay-and-repeal law was suspended.
Read more: http://www.fairvote.org/maine_law_still_requires_rcv_in_june_primaries
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