Democratic Experiment

Maine’s Radical Democratic Experiment

An unpopular governor and a voter uprising are leading to historic political reforms that could reverberate across the country.

By COLIN WOODARD

Maine is about to embark on an unprecedented experiment in American democracy, and Paul LePage—the state’s belligerent, foul-mouthed and polarizing governor—is a big part of the reason why. After eight years of LePage, who made national headlines by telling the NAACP to “kiss my butt” and informed a state senator that he wanted to “give it to the people without Vaseline” while tangling with the leaders of his own party—voters here are willing to try almost anything to improve the political climate, even something no other state has ever tried before.

So in June, Maine will hold the nation’s first statewide primary election using ranked choice voting, a rarely used system championed by political reformers whereby voters get to rank their candidate preferences, rather than simply choosing their favorite. The election is the result of a citizen’s referendum passed nearly two years ago, and a whole lot of wrangling and maneuvering in between, and will even include a ballot question that, in effect, will decide whether the system is used in November’s U.S. Senate and House races as well.

It could wind up being a train wreck.

Reformers have fought for a decade to introduce the system in this state, where independent candidates are not only commonplace, they’ve also won three governor’s races in living memory. Independents currently hold one of Maine’s U.S. Senate seats and a half dozen seats in the state legislature. Voters here have long fretted about spoiler candidates and the wisdom of strategic voting, and their concern increased markedly after 2010, when vote-splitting allowed LePage to win the governorship, an event that proved fatal to the state’s moderate and mild-mannered political culture. A groundswell of support—including active campaigning by Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and Phish drummer Jon Fishman—helped the reform get approved in a statewide ballot initiative the same day Donald Trump was elected president.

If Maine’s favorable conditions allow the reforms to take root—and many elected officials have done their best to ensure they do not—the implications will likely be felt around the country. “There haven’t been very many instances in recent years where a small state has had the potential to have such an impact on national reform efforts,” says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “If Maine implements this, the momentum for adopting similar initiatives and legislation for ranked choice voting in other states is going to accelerate.”

“All eyes,” he says, “are on Maine now.”

But many political incumbents haven’t been so keen on the system, and would already have snuffed it out if not for a second voter uprising. The original voter-approved law ran afoul of language in the Maine constitution, put into place 138 years ago after an election dispute nearly plunged the state into civil war, allowing lawmakers to pass a law this past October that effectively killed the initiative, only to have the legislation suspended after ranked-choice enthusiasts collected enough signatures to put it up for a “people’s veto” vote, which will also be on the June 12 ballot.

This means that on the second Tuesday of June, Mainers will effectively decide whether ranked-choice voting will be used in this year’s general election for federal offices—state general election contests will likely require a constitutional fix— while participating in a first-in-the-nation statewide primary using the system under potentially disastrous conditions. That’s because the unenthusiastic legislature—the Senate is controlled by Republicans, the House by Democrats—has failed to appropriate any money to buy ballot-counting machines, upgrade software, print ballots or pay the gas and overtime of state troopers who would transport ballots to the state capitol from communities many hours’ drive—or boat ride—away.

“We’re facing the Apollo 13 scenario, where you get that role of duct tape and that piece of hose and have to make it work,” says Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, referring to the improvised onboard repairs that saved the crew of a 1970 lunar mission after a shipboard explosion. “The problem with that scenario is you’re looking at potential delays of days or even weeks, and every day that goes by without definite results will make people concerned that something is going on.”

Worse, legislators haven’t given Dunlap’s office authority to make rules on the nitty-gritty of conducting the election, tabulating votes or holding recounts, details the citizens referendum didn’t include. “What happens if a voter starts ranking candidates [at] No. 2 [skipping over a first choice]? That’s where rulemaking comes in,” adds Dunlap, who is best known on the national stage for serving on and ultimately suing Trump’s voter fraud commission in an effort to be included in its deliberations. “We need the authority to act. We can’t just proceed on our own, but there’s been a major holdup at the legislature on doing their work.”

But with absentee voting starting just weeks away, legislators still don’t have a bill under consideration that would grant this authority to appropriate the $833,664 Dunlap’s office has estimated will be needed to make the primary and November’s general election for Maine’s two congressional seats and Sen. Angus King’s Senate seat go smoothly.

Not the best way, perhaps, to introduce a new voting system to the public and nation, but such has been the fate of the ranked-choice voting effort in Maine, where majorities of voters and legislators don’t see eye to eye and have fought one another into a series of stalemates. But proponents appear to have the wind at their backs, and they are confident America’s first statewide ranked-choice system will win hearts and minds across the country if it is simply given a chance to work.

“We’ve lost our civility in politics. There’s gridlock and such polarization and negativity,” laments former state Senator Dick Woodbury, a centrist independent who chairs the Committee for Rank Choice Voting, the ballot question committee that’s led the effort. “I think this reform has the potential to nudge things in the right direction and be a model for the country, which is why we should be embracing this opportunity.”

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In a ranked choice or “instant runoff” system—first invented by Danish mathematician Carl Andrae in 1855 and promptly used in his country’s parliamentary elections—voters receive a ballot on which they can rank candidates for an office by order of preference. In Maine’s Republican primary this June, for instance, party members will confront a field of five gubernatorial candidates seeking to succeed LePage, and assign them ranks 1 through 5. If somebody wins a majority of the first-choice votes, the contest is over and they will be declared the winner. If not, the candidate who got the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and each of their voters’ second choices is added to each of the remaining candidates. If there still isn’t a majority, the candidate in last is again removed, and their supporter’s next-highest ranked choices are added to the vote tallies of the survivors. The process continues until someone has a majority or all ballots are exhausted.

This system, which is intended to eliminate concerns about vote splitting and encourages candidates to cultivate support from a wide range of constituencies, is already being used to elect the mayors of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Fe, Minneapolis and Portland, Maine; the leaders of Canada’s three major political parties; the president of Ireland; and, for the past 99 years, the members of Australia’s House of Representatives. Maine, however, will be the first U.S. state to use it for gubernatorial and legislative primaries, congressional elections and, if the constitutional problems can be resolved, all state offices, including governor. “It’s not like Maine is venturing into some uncharted territory,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America who studies political reform. “It’s adapting to a system that’s been adopted successfully in cities across the country and countries around the world.”

But in the U.S., at least, the benefits of the system haven’t been as clear as proponents might have hoped. Jason McDaniel, a political scientist at San Francisco State University, has analyzed the returns of that city’s municipal elections, where ranked choice has been used since 2002. He found the system increased the prevalence of spoiled ballots, particularly in areas where more African-American, Latino, elderly, foreign-born and less affluent people live, and that the problem didn’t go away over time. Voter turnout rates were also reduced for infrequent voters, even as it increased among the highly educated. “The ranking process is cognitively more difficult than just choosing one candidate, and that seems to drive a decline in turnout,” McDaniel says. The University of Minnesota’s Laurence Jacobs and Joanne Miller found similar patterns in the 2013 Minneapolis election: “Voters who were more affluent and white turned out at a higher rate, completed their ballots more accurately and were more likely to use all … opportunities to rank their most preferred candidates compared with voters living in low-income neighborhoods and in communities of color,” they reported.

On the other hand, voter surveys have shown that people in cities using ranked choice voting in 2013 were significantly more satisfied with the conduct of municipal campaigns and felt there was substantially less negative campaigning compared with their counterparts in cities that used conventional plurality voting. Researchers have also shown that many of the socio-economic disparities Miller and Jacobs found in Minneapolis were present in that city’s older, conventional elections as well; disparities weren’t helped or hurt by the switch, David Kimball and Joseph Anthony of the University of Missouri-St. Louis concluded, though the rate of spoiled ballots with the new system increased.

“The bottom line is that the system we have now is not working for most Americans and is creating a divisive politics and destructive and toxic partisanship,” says New America’s Drutman. “I think there’s a real urgency to experiment with other systems, and ranked choice voting encourages consensus seeking because candidates want to be people’s second choice if they can’t be their first.”

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Maine’s political environment provided perfect soil for such an experiment. It’s a purple state where independents form the largest voting bloc, a place that for decades has sent moderates of both parties to the U.S. Senate: Margaret Chase Smith, George Mitchell, Bill Cohen and Olympia Snowe. Independents have occupied the governor’s mansion twice since 1974, and one of them, King, is seeking his second term in the Senate. The Green Party hit its national high-water mark here in the mid-2000s, when it held a third of Portland’s city council seats and one seat in the lower chamber of the State House, and had a gubernatorial candidate on the ballot. As a result, statewide contests almost always feature three or more candidates, and it’s been 20 years since a gubernatorial candidate won a majority of the vote.

This climate—where voters, parties, and candidates were constantly forced to ponder the dangers of vote splitting and spoiler candidates—produced some early advocates of ranked choice voting. The legislature contemplated the system as early as 2004, and the state chapter of the League of Women Voters started researching the system four years later. Diane Russell, a Portland state representative who had promoted ranked choice across the country for Fair Vote, the national election reform advocacy group, helped convince officials in her home city to embrace it for mayoral elections in 2010, and began pushing for it at the State House.

“Everyone thinks I introduced this legislation because I hate Paul LePage,” she said, but she noted this was in 2008, when the bombastic governor was the little-known mayor of Waterville, a central Maine city of 16,000. “I didn’t even know who he was.”

Which is not to say Maine’s famously irascible governor has nothing to do with why ranked choice voting caught fire. Russell’s initiative was languishing in obscurity until 2010, when the decidedly immoderate LePage shocked the Republican establishment by winning the gubernatorial primary. LePage, a Trump-like figure who remains popular with his base and is loathed by most everyone else, then won the general election with just 38 percent of the vote after his opponents‘ vote split among four candidates. The runner-up, a corporate lawyer and political independent named Eliot Cutler, called for the state to adopt ranked choice voting both during and after the polarizing election, perhaps motivated by the fact he would have won under the new system and was ramping up for a rematch against LePage in 2014.

Woodbury, a Cutler supporter then serving in the Maine Senate, tried and failed to pass a ranked choice bill at the State House in 2013, prompting proponents to mount a citizens referendum campaign. “You had the 2014 gubernatorial race heating up, and a major part of [Democratic nominee Mike] Michaud’s campaign was characterizing Cutler as the spoiler in the effort to defeat LePage,” Woodbury recalls.

Legislative efforts having failed in both Republican- and Democratic-controlled legislatures, Woodbury, Russell and other proponents organized to take the issue directly to citizens in a ballot referendum. They gathered tens of thousands of signatures on Election Day, 2014—which ended with LePage’s reelection with 48 percent of the vote—and ultimately got the issue on the November 2016 ballot to take advantage of presidential-year turnout. “We got on the ballot and spent the next year literally knocking on doors and holding ranked-choice voting events, like pizza parties or pub nights where people would practice ranking their candidates,” recalls Russell, who toiled on the ballot question committee, a well-financed entity backed by Cutler associates, progressive Democratic campaigners, billionaire former Enron trader John Arnold’s Action Now Initiative and hundreds of small donors. “We built up a lot of excitement.”

On election night, Trump captured the White House, inadvertently assisted by Green Party nominee Jill Stein, whose vote count exceeded his margin of victory in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And Maine voters approved ranked choice voting by a 52-48 margin. “I thought we were there!” recalls Woodbury.

Then history intervened, literally.

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The crisis that derailed ranked choice in 2017 began all the way back on Election Day 1879, when Republican gubernatorial candidate Daniel Davis missed an outright majority by three-tenths of a percent in a three-way race. By the laws of the day, this threw the contest to the newly elected legislature, which according to preliminary results was under full Republican control. But the incumbent, Democrat Alonzo Garcelon, decided to “review” the legislative races, disqualifying thousands of ballots on questionable grounds to give Democrats and their allies control of both chambers. The brazen move placed Maine on the brink of civil war. Senator James Blaine rushed back from Washington to rally Republican militia forces on the front lawn of his Augusta home and faced off against Garcelon’s irregulars, who guarded the State House across the street.

Only the coolheadedness of General Joshua Chamberlain, hero of the Battle of Gettysburg and head of the state militia, prevented a descent into violence. Taking control of the State House while further court opinions were sought, he was denounced by both sides and nearly killed by a mob before the court reiterated its position and Republican legislators were able to convene to make Davis governor. They also passed legislation that resulted in a constitutional amendment explicitly providing for governors and legislators to be popularly elected by a plurality. Mainers, horrified by the previous winter’s events, endorsed it.

All of this presented a problem last May when leaders of the Republican-controlled state Senate asked the state’s highest court to advise them whether ranked choice voting would pass constitutional muster. Not in regard to the general elections for governor and legislators, the court said, because plurality voting is enshrined in the state constitution. Democrats put forth legislation to change the constitution but were denied the necessary supermajority by Republicans, who in October pushed through a law that effectively killed the citizen referendum. “I believe it is our job as legislators to draft laws that comply with our constitution,” the bill’s sponsor, state Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason, testified. “We should not seek to amend our constitution to accommodate new laws.”

The move, which followed legislative efforts to sabotage successful citizen referenda to legalize marijuana, impose a tax on the wealthy to fund schools and expand Medicaid, may backfire. The ranked choice camp promptly collected the 88,000 signatures needed to put a partial repeal of the new law before voters this June via a special Maine mechanism called a “citizen’s veto.” Until the vote, the law is suspended, so the June primaries will use ranked choice voting. If the experiment is successful, November’s U.S. Senate contest and both of the state’s House seats will be decided using the new system as well, while the gubernatorial and legislative general election contests will await a constitutional fix.

Whether the latter happens may hinge on the strength of the Democratic wave in November, as the issue has become a partisan one among legislators, with most Democrats and independents strongly for, Republicans against. “In practice, it’s going to lead to a lot of confusion and create a barrier to participation, all for some vague benefit of politicians being nicer to each other,” says Jason Savage, executive director of the Maine Republican Party. Maine Democratic Party Chair Phil Bartlett counters that his party supports ranked choice as a way to increase inclusiveness while minimizing divisiveness. “The Republicans recognize in this current environment that they are losing support across the state, and the best way for [them to win] any statewide office is not to have ranked choice,” he says.

Until then, Secretary Dunlap is hoping a last-ditch legislative effort to get him the resources he needs is successful in the divided legislature. “This has to be implemented in a way that promotes trust,” he pleads. “We don’t want to have a replay of elections in the past that were contested by force of arms.”