Maine RCV
Hi folks,
Interesting report by Sara Wolk on votingtheory.org:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/606/rcv-found-unconstitutional-in-maine
In short: the Maine legislature decided to expand RCV/IRV beyond federal
offices to state and local offices, but worried about both a governor's
veto, and/or an overturn from Maine's high court (the "SJC" or "Supreme
Judicial Court"). So, rather than sending it to the governor (whose veto
could be for many reasons), they sent it to the SJC first. The SJC said "The
Maine Constitution, construed as a whole, treats a 'vote' as a single
choice, tallied by a municipality" That not only has implications for
RCV, but many other systems too. A brief explainer with direct links the
SJC opinion and some key quotes from them is available on electowiki:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Maine#2026_advisory_opinion
The "tallied by a municipality" caveat is interesting, since it implies
precinct summability is important to the SJC.
Thoughts?
Rob
p.s. my cursory investigation of this topic was in preparation for the
ElectoramaCall, which is happening in a few hours:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/ElectoramaCall
Greetings gentleman,
And thanks Rob,
So, not even approval would pass? Nothing beyond plurality?
On Wed, 15 Apr 2026, 6:08 pm Rob Lanphier via Election-Methods, <
election-methods@lists.electorama.com> wrote:
Hi folks,
Interesting report by Sara Wolk on votingtheory.org:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/606/rcv-found-unconstitutional-in-maine
In short: the Maine legislature decided to expand RCV/IRV beyond federal
offices to state and local offices, but worried about both a governor's
veto, and/or an overturn from Maine's high court (the "SJC" or "Supreme
Judicial Court"). So, rather than sending it to the governor (whose veto
could be for many reasons), they sent it to the SJC first. The SJC said "The
Maine Constitution, construed as a whole, treats a 'vote' as a single
choice, tallied by a municipality" That not only has implications for
RCV, but many other systems too. A brief explainer with direct links the
SJC opinion and some key quotes from them is available on electowiki:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Maine#2026_advisory_opinion
The "tallied by a municipality" caveat is interesting, since it implies
precinct summability is important to the SJC.
Thoughts?
Rob
p.s. my cursory investigation of this topic was in preparation for the
ElectoramaCall, which is happening in a few hours:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/ElectoramaCall
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
Good evening gentlemen,
This whole situation led me to think of how might someone dead-set on IRV
get around this, which would obviously be through runoff voting.
Which in turn made me think of runoff itself, and how it's an inefficient
way to parse a crowded field of candidates in round one. Once you get to
round two, there's no games left to play, and a contest between two parties
only is at least immune to on-the-day voter strategy.
Of course, if we let more candidates than two survive the first round, we
would suffer from potentially fewer failures on round 1, but potentially
more on round 2.
So, which is the optimal way to minimise the total strategizing across two
rounds?
Three candidates? However many top-voted collectively clear half the votes
cast? Any other ideas? Or is "top two" likely the best compromise anyway?
Regards,
Etjon
On Wed, 15 Apr 2026, 8:59 pm Etjon Basha, etjonbasha@gmail.com wrote:
Greetings gentleman,
And thanks Rob,
So, not even approval would pass? Nothing beyond plurality?
On Wed, 15 Apr 2026, 6:08 pm Rob Lanphier via Election-Methods, <
election-methods@lists.electorama.com> wrote:
Hi folks,
Interesting report by Sara Wolk on votingtheory.org:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/606/rcv-found-unconstitutional-in-maine
In short: the Maine legislature decided to expand RCV/IRV beyond federal
offices to state and local offices, but worried about both a governor's
veto, and/or an overturn from Maine's high court (the "SJC" or "Supreme
Judicial Court"). So, rather than sending it to the governor (whose veto
could be for many reasons), they sent it to the SJC first. The SJC said "The
Maine Constitution, construed as a whole, treats a 'vote' as a single
choice, tallied by a municipality" That not only has implications for
RCV, but many other systems too. A brief explainer with direct links the
SJC opinion and some key quotes from them is available on electowiki:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Maine#2026_advisory_opinion
The "tallied by a municipality" caveat is interesting, since it
implies precinct summability is important to the SJC.
Thoughts?
Rob
p.s. my cursory investigation of this topic was in preparation for the
ElectoramaCall, which is happening in a few hours:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/ElectoramaCall
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:59:15 +1000
Etjon Basha via Election-Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com wrote:
Good evening gentlemen,
This whole situation led me to think of how might someone dead-set on IRV
get around this, which would obviously be through runoff voting.
Which in turn made me think of runoff itself, and how it's an inefficient
way to parse a crowded field of candidates in round one. Once you get to
round two, there's no games left to play, and a contest between two parties
only is at least immune to on-the-day voter strategy.
Of course, if we let more candidates than two survive the first round, we
would suffer from potentially fewer failures on round 1, but potentially
more on round 2.
So, which is the optimal way to minimise the total strategizing across two
rounds?
Three candidates? However many top-voted collectively clear half the votes
cast? Any other ideas? Or is "top two" likely the best compromise anyway?
3 rounds can get greatly improved strategic properties in common real life scenarios.
Round 1 keep top 3,
Round 2 keep top 2,
Round 3 elect top 1.
This solves the today common problem of two dominant parties/candidates
with one of them having a serious competitor,
because both dominants and the competitor would make it to round 2,
where the dominant party with a competitor would in practice
only compete with their competitor for a spot in round 3,
which gets all the properties of only two candidates.
The votesplitting caused by the competitor would never
(in relevant scenarios) be an advantage to the second
dominant without a competitor of their own,
Someone would have to figure out what (any?) changes to the numerous
strategic equilibria of round 1 and their implications,
especially what happens if both dominant parties/candidates get their own
serious competitor for round 1.
Can't really do better with only two rounds then keeping top 2,
but if we decide on some fixed number of rounds R (2 or more),
then keeping top R in round 1 and reducing it by one every round
is more or less optimal as a system.
We could start with some number of keep top remaining half,
which would still bring a meaning full strategic improvement
for every such round before keep top R then countdown
eliminating one party/candidate per round.
But I think R round are acceptable then there is
more benefit to go directly to the keep top R
and eliminating one per round countdown.
(The most I have heard acceptable are 3 rounds.)
Gustav
On 4/30/26 02:59, Etjon Basha via Election-Methods wrote:
This whole situation led me to think of how might someone dead-set on
IRV get around this, which would obviously be through runoff voting.
Simple. Eliminate pairwise losing candidates when they occur. (A
pairwise losing candidate is a candidate who would lose every one-on-one
contest against every remaining candidate.)
This approach allows as many candidates as desired. The runoff election
can include two candidates from each party. Even if four political
parties are able to meet the threshold requirement.
Or, if the primary election is "open," the "top" 5 or 6 candidates can
be in the runoff election, even if plurality voting is used in the open
primary.
Besides dramatically increasing the likelihood the winner will be the
Condorcet winner, this method resists tactical/strategic voting. Its
strategy resistance is similar to Benham's method, which is much better
than most other Condorcet methods.
Here is election-grade software that already offers this option to
eliminate pairwise losing candidates:
https://github.com/cpsolver/rctabplus
This RCTabPlus software is a fork of the RCTab software maintained by
the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center (RCVRC), which is aligned with
the FairVote organization. In other words, RCTab is the official
software used as the basis for IRV elections in the United States.
For the benefit of voters who dislike math details, and who prefer
videos, here's a video at r/EndFPTP that demonstrates this improvement
over IRV using representative ballots for the Alaska special election
between Peltola and Begich and Palin.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1sw9as7/pairwise_vote_counting/
These 35 animated ballots nicely summarize the actual proportions of
ballots in that actual election -- after omitting minor candidates.
Claude AI helped me find that 34 or 35 ballots is a sweet spot for
matching proportions with that election's real election percentages.
As a reminder, this Alaska election was a top-four runoff after an open
primary. The second Democrat dropped out to shift votes to the
remaining Democrat, who won based on IRV counting.
Importantly, Sarah Palin was the pairwise losing candidate. If she had
been eliminated instead of Begich, the Condorcet winner, Begich, would
have won.
The name "Ranked Choice Voting Plus" separates pairwise-counted methods
(including Condorcet methods and this modification of IRV) from the
"basic" version of Ranked Choice Voting that FairVote promotes (which we
call IRV).
This refinement is easy to explain to voters who strongly want IRV. Use
a sports metaphor. When a soccer tournament has a team that has lost
against every other team still in the playoffs, that pairwise losing
soccer team clearly deserves to be eliminated.
The result is a method that does not need to be constrained to a top-two
runoff in order to avoid unfair results (vote splitting, center squeeze
effect, non-Condorcet winner, etc.).
Most importantly, although billionaires can control which candidate from
each party gets the party's first spot, the candidate who gets the
party's second-most votes will be a candidate who is likely to be
favored by the majority of voters. One of those second-nominee
candidates is likely to win.
Bonus: Ranked choice voting (either "plus" or "basic") strongly resists
voter-suppression tactics.
Expressed in terms of the 2024 US presidential election, the second
Republican candidate would have been Nikki Haley because she got the
second-most votes in the Republican primary. Assuming Kamala Harris was
the second Democratic candidate, either Haley or Harris would have won
because a majority of voters would have ranked them higher than either
of the billionaire-backed front-runners.
In summary, eliminating pairwise losing candidates (when they occur)
ensures the winner is virtually always supported by a majority of
voters, which is the basis for fair single-winner elections.
The word "virtually" allows for the fact that it's mathematically
possible to identify a scenario that violates this claim. However, such
a scenario has to involve the majority-supported Condorcet winner
appearing as the first choice on a relatively small percentage of
ballots. IRV fans are trained by FairVote to distrust such a result.
This simple solution meets the needs of both IRV fans and Condorcet
fans. Also it meets the most meaningful needs of Approval fans and STAR
fans.
Although you didn't mention the IRV issue of "overvotes," note that
RCTabPlus adds an overvote-counting rule that is far better than any of
the overvote rules in RCTab.
Richard Fobes
The VoteFair guy
On 4/30/26 02:59, Etjon Basha via Election-Methods wrote:
Good evening gentlemen,
This whole situation led me to think of how might someone dead-set on
IRV get around this, which would obviously be through runoff voting.
Which in turn made me think of runoff itself, and how it's an
inefficient way to parse a crowded field of candidates in round one.
Once you get to round two, there's no games left to play, and a contest
between two parties only is at least immune to on-the-day voter strategy.
Of course, if we let more candidates than two survive the first round,
we would suffer from potentially fewer failures on round 1, but
potentially more on round 2.
So, which is the optimal way to minimise the total strategizing across
two rounds?
Three candidates? However many top-voted collectively clear half the
votes cast? Any other ideas? Or is "top two" likely the best compromise
anyway?
Regards,
Etjon
On Wed, 15 Apr 2026, 8:59 pm Etjon Basha, <etjonbasha@gmail.com
mailto:etjonbasha@gmail.com> wrote:
Greetings gentleman,
And thanks Rob,
So, not even approval would pass? Nothing beyond plurality?
On Wed, 15 Apr 2026, 6:08 pm Rob Lanphier via Election-Methods,
<election-methods@lists.electorama.com <mailto:election-
methods@lists.electorama.com>> wrote:
Hi folks,
Interesting report by Sara Wolk on votingtheory.org <http://
votingtheory.org>:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/606/rcv-found-
unconstitutional-in-maine <https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/
topic/606/rcv-found-unconstitutional-in-maine>
In short: the Maine legislature decided to expand RCV/IRV beyond
federal offices to state and local offices, but worried about
both a governor's veto, and/or an overturn from Maine's high
court (the "SJC" or "Supreme Judicial Court"). So, rather than
sending it to the governor (whose veto could be for many
reasons), they sent it to the SJC first. The SJC said "/The
Maine Constitution, construed as a whole, treats a 'vote' as a
single choice, tallied by a municipality/" That not only has
implications for RCV, but many other systems too. A brief
explainer with direct links the SJC opinion and some key quotes
from them is available on electowiki:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Maine#2026_advisory_opinion
<https://electowiki.org/wiki/Maine#2026_advisory_opinion>
The "/tallied by a municipality/" caveat is interesting, since
it implies precinct summability is important to the SJC.
Thoughts?
Rob
p.s. my cursory investigation of this topic was in preparation
for the ElectoramaCall, which is happening in a few hours:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/ElectoramaCall <https://
electowiki.org/wiki/ElectoramaCall>
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em
<https://electorama.com/em> for list info
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info
On 04/30/2026 12:38 PM EDT Richard via Election-Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com wrote:
On 4/30/26 02:59, Etjon Basha via Election-Methods wrote:
This whole situation led me to think of how might someone dead-set on
IRV get around this, which would obviously be through runoff voting.
Simple. Eliminate pairwise losing candidates when they occur. (A
pairwise losing candidate is a candidate who would lose every one-on-one
contest against every remaining candidate.)
What if there is a cycle and only three candidates remaining? Then none of them are the pairwise loser.
Bottom-Two Runoff is even simpler. Rather than finding the pairwise loser, just eliminate the loser of the pair of candidates having the least number of "votes" (in how IRV counts "votes").
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.