Upcoming Maine vote could revolutionize elections

If the old saw from the 18th and 19th centuries — As Maine

goes, so goes the nation — has any 21st-century validity, the entire nation may be on the verge of an entirely new political era.

In less than two months, this state, which has had three Independent governors in the last four decades and has an Independent in the Senate today, will embark on a breathtaking new era, selecting nominees and public officials in a daring new election scheme that could turn the Dale Earnhardt epigraph (“Second place is just the first-place loser”) on its head.

This grand experiment, approved earlier this month by the state Supreme Judicial Court after years of debate and contention, has the potential of changing the way citizens vote, the way candidates behave, the way political contributions are made and the way Maine is governed. It could upend the current culture of negative campaigning and alter the character of politics.

Or it could fail miserably, leaving Maine politics in rubble for a decade, and blacken the name of political reform for a generation.

That’s because this June, Maine will become the first state to implement broad use of a ranked-choice voting system: In multicandidate races, voters would rank their selections, giving life to the contenders who are their second and third choices. Then, if no contender gets a majority, the rankings would be employed to bolster candidate vote counts and then eliminate them until one of them gets a majority.

Here’s a simple explanation, provided by Greg Kesich, the editorial page editor of the Portland Press Herald: “It’s basically a series of runoffs, but instead of having to keep coming back for another election, you cast all your votes at once.”

This plan has the shiny profile of the new, but it has been knocking around Maine for a decade, promoted by an unusual coalition of activists that includes Eliot Cutler, who was a principal in the Democratic presidential campaigns of Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine and Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia, but who has been an Independent for a dozen years.

“It’s a good thing for the state because it guarantees that whoever assumes office will have the support of more than 50 percent of the state’s voters,” said Cutler. “Governors who take office with less than a majority — which we have had repeatedly here in Maine — are handicapped. They don’t have anything close to a mandate.”

This scheme has been used sparingly across the country, in cities such as San Francisco, Oakland, Minneapolis and even here in Portland, but this is the first statewide test.

Some experts believe the new system, which requires several voter choices, will so complicate the process that people will be discouraged from voting.

Not so, say the backers, a group called the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting. They insist that the new system gives life — and a fighting chance — to Independents and third-party candidates that many voters might favor but whose prospects are so dim that they would be reluctant to go to the polls or, once there, be reluctant to cast their ballots for less prominent candidates.

Because of a wrinkle in the Maine constitution, this scheme will apply only to primaries and to federal races. It will not apply to general-election contests for governor or the state legislature.

And, in fact, the extent of its application is one of the big unknowns that will be determined.

There remain constitutional challenges. There remains much uncertainty. And there remains a ballot measure that poses a vital question to primary voters: Do you want this system, or do you want the state legislature, which does not want this system, to examine it further? That may be the least visible, and most important, issue at all at the ballot box this spring.