Maine GOP seeks out-of-state funds for referendum to repeal ranked-choice voting

Blaming ranked-choice voting for Bruce Poliquin’s loss to U.S. Rep. Jared Golden in Maine’s Second Congressional District, the chair of Maine’s Republican Party says she wants to take the electoral reform back to the voters once again. This time she says she has a plan to raise out-of-state funding to repeal the law.

“We had that horrible situation called ranked-choice voting. Because Bruce Poliquin won. He won, and yet he lost,” said Maine GOP Chair Demi Kouzounas at a speech at the Androscoggin County Republican Committee’s annual Lincoln Day dinner on Feb. 8. “And this is something that is now spreading like wildfire to the rest of the states in the country. They’re worried about it.”

According to Kouzounas, efforts to launch a repeal referendum have been complicated by concerns about viability and funding.

“It’s more complicated than I even understood. You think it’s just about the signatures but it’s more than that. We have to be ready to fight,” she told party members.

“We can get the signatures. The issue is then we have [Michael] Bloomberg spending maybe two or three million dollars fighting it on TV ads to defeat it once it’s a referendum on our ballots,” she said. “So the next step will be for me to go back to my [Republican State] committee to ask them if they’re willing to give me the money to do a poll, that is a very accurate poll, to show [the Republican National Committee] that probably more than fifty percent of the state does not like ranked-choice voting. When we have that information we can then petition Vermont and other states, Rhode Island, Florida, and say help us because if you don’t help us you guys are going to have this next.”

This focus on national support seems to contradict Kouzounas’ past statements complaining about outside money in state elections. She has specifically dismissed popular support for ranked-choice voting among Mainers by painting it as a top-down push from out-of-state donors. “The change is coming from these outside groups, not Mainers,” she claimed last year.

Kouzounas’ assumption that Mainers are ready to reject ranked-choice voting may be out of touch with national voting trends. In every state where pro-democracy reforms were on the ballot in the 2018 midterm elections, those reforms won, often by large margins. In ballot initiatives in Florida, Arkansas and North Carolina, voters elected to make voter registration easier, restrict partisan gerrymandering and re-enfranchise people with past felony convictions.

In Maine, where the last 9 gubernatorial elections before 2018 were won by a plurality of voters, and the last three with less than 40 percent of the vote, ranked-choice voting was made law by a 2016 ballot initiative, passing with 52 percent of the vote. It went before the voters again in June 2018 as a “people’s veto,” after the state legislature repealed the voter-mandated law, and passed again, this time with 55-percent voter approval.

In the 2018 midterm elections, Maine was the first state to use ranked-choice voting in U.S. House and Senate elections.

Kouzounas’ assessment of ranked-choice voting’s growing appeal around the country appears to be accurate.

This year, state legislatures in 16 states, including Maine, are considering 34 different bills which would enact or expand the voting system, also known as instant runoff or single transferable vote. The number of cities using ranked-choice voting also grew from 10 to 22 over the past year.

According to Anna Kellar of Maine Citizens for Clean Elections and the League of Women Voters, Maine’s Republican Party has already filed to collect petitions to repeal the voting system. “Every attempt to get rid of it has kind of backfired, but I’m not surprised that they’re keeping going,” she said. “We saw that Maine voters mostly liked it and were able to use it. There aren’t constitutional arguments against it.”

“It’s booming market for talking about how better elections could be possible,” said Rob Richie, founder of FairVote, at a talk at Colby College last week.

“When things aren’t working, it’s our responsibility to act. I think that’s where some of the energy is coming from for ranked-choice voting and some of the other changes out there,” said Richie. “As we grapple with how to handle voter choice and handle the things that are causing disfunction with our system, I think ranked-choice voting is something we are going to see more and more.”

(Photo: Signatures collected in February 2018 to put the “people’s veto” of the repeal of the ranked-choice voting law on the ballot.)