The Maine Supreme Court is in unanimous agreement that expanding the use of ranked-choice voting to include all state elections would represent a violation of the Maine State Constitution.
Maine has used ranked-choice voting for federal offices since 2018, but the Maine Supreme Court explained in a 2017 advisory opinion that requiring candidates for state offices to earn majority support would violate the Maine Constitution, which states that the candidate winning the most votes, or a plurality, prevails and does not stipulate that a majority — or more than 50 percent — is needed to win.
Although LD 1666 sought to adapt the language of ranked-choice voting so that it would be permissible within these constraints, the opinion released Monday revealed that the Maine Supreme Court Justices were unconvinced.
Lawmakers originally approved this expansion during the previous legislative session, but the bill was recalled from the governor’s desk at the last minute and carried over to this year for further consideration.
Despite receiving approval for a second time in both the House and Senate this February, lawmakers held the bill before sending it back to Gov. Janet Mills (D) and sought guidance from the Maine Supreme Court in the form of an updated advisory opinion.
“The provisions requiring election by a plurality of votes do not allow for the counting of additional votes, or ‘tabulations,’ based on ‘instruction from the voter,'” the Court declared in their unanimous opinion Monday. “The proposed legislation is thus contrary to the [Maine] Constitution.”
While proponents of LD 1666 had pointed towards the Alaska Supreme Court’s disagreement with Maine’s decision in 2017, the Justices remained steadfast in their interpretation.
“We are not persuaded by the Alaska court’s reasoning, largely because, as the Justices—including one of us—concluded in 2017, the tabulation of votes in rounds is not ‘simply another method of carrying out the Constitution’s requirement of a plurality,'” they said.
“Unlike the Alaska Constitution,” they continued, “which delegates broad authority to Alaska’s Legislature to oversee elections and does not specify the way in which votes are cast, sorted, counted, and declared, the Maine Constitution provides significant detail about what it means to cast a vote that we simply cannot ignore.”
“The Maine Constitution clearly establishes that the winner is ‘the first to pass the post’ in the election,” the Justices explained.
At the close of their opinion, the Justices were careful to clarify that their ruling did not represent a policy judgement, but rather reflected an understanding of “fundamental constitutional principles.”
“Based on the language and structure of the Constitution itself, we conclude that LD 1666, like the legislation upon which the Justices opined in 2017, would, if enacted, violate the Maine Constitution,” they concluded.
