Lauren Besanko, who ran as a Maine Green Independent Party candidate for state representative, recently wrote an article for the Bangor Daily News about Maine’s growing movement for ranked-choice voting. From the article, entitled “The Two-Party Duopoly is the Problem”:

Ranked choice voting allows people to vote for several candidates in order, from their favorite to their least favorite, by assigning candidates numerical values. Their favorite candidate would receive the “No. 1” vote, their second favorite the “No. 2” vote and so on. One of the points of election reform like this should be to eliminate the “spoiler” effect, so we don’t end up splitting the vote, for example, between center-left and farther-left candidates, resulting in electing a far-right tea party Republican. Reform like this could very well be the start of a path toward the end of a political system dominated by the two parties.

People who say “Green is the party of my heart, Dems are the party of my pragmatism” will no longer have this excuse to use in three-way races. They would be officially free to vote for Greens as their first choice without worrying their vote will inadvertently result in a Republican’s election.

Read the full article at the Bangor Daily News.