While I had noted that a Trump-appointed Federal judge had rejected a lawsuit from Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) that sought to invalidate an election result generated from ranked choice voting (RCV), the game isn’t over yet, as the Bangor Daily News reports:
Attorneys for U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin are asking the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to prevent the state of Maine from sending a certification to Congress that says Jared Golden won November election in the 2nd Congressional District. …
As with Poliquin’s original complaint, the latest motion claims that ranked-choice voting violates the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause because it prevents voters from knowing which candidates will be in the so-called instant run-off election if no candidate gets a majority of votes in the first round. It also argues that ranked-choice voting violates the Equal Protection clause by allowing “certain voters, but not others, the ability to shift their vote from candidate to candidate, thereby affording them a greater degree and different kind of electoral power.”
But I think there’s more going on here at a national level than many realize. RCV is an important change to the voting landscape because it obviates the advantage Republicans have over Democrats when it comes to voting discipline. As has become increasingly apparent over the last three decades, Republicans vote Republican, and rarely is there a second conservative in a general election[1].
This is not as true of Democrats. A Democrat, miffed by a rejection in the primaries or at the caucuses, will be seen running as an independent, or as a Green Party member. More generally, there are more party options on the left side of the spectrum than the right, and that has the tendency to split the vote – and that’s disaster for the Democrat. Remember the candidacy of Ralph Nader in 2000? Without him splitting the liberal, it might have been President Gore[2].
RCV has the potential to relieve that disaster. For the Republicans, anyone other than a Republican winning is unacceptable because there are no other real independent conservative parties, not since the Libertarians chose to join the Republicans.
But Democrats can easily work with other liberal parties if necessary. They already do that in the United States Senate, where Senators Sanders and King are not Democrats, but Independents – but both caucus and vote with the Democrats.
And since RCV will allow a liberal voter to list their personal favorite candidate first, and the Democrat second or even third, and get the same result as listing the Democrat first, all of a sudden the Republican disciplined voter advantage disappears.
Maine is the first State in the Union to use RCV, and that’s why this is the first time there’s been serious litigation over it. Because of the tactical consequences of the final ruling on the issue, it’s worth keeping an eye on it. If RCV is approved by SCOTUS itself, the Republicans will find one of their built-in advantages has disappeared.
And this will be a good thing. Not because more Democrats will potentially win, although I don’t have a problem with that, but because one of the key pillars of Republican validity will disappear, the one that says We hold power, therefore what we’re doing is right! There’s a lot of moral momentum behind electoral victories, because it seems to say that voters approve of what you’re doing. That is the naive viewpoint; sophisticates are aware that vote splitting by multiple candidates on the liberal side of the spectrum, voter suppression tactics, even foreign adversary interference, can swing an election, if it’s undertaken with suitable panache.
And, contrariwise, a string of losses should lead to introspection and modification. A single loss, no, but when you start stringing them together, there’s an indication that something is going wrong, and while it’s popular to blame marketing and messaging, there’s always the worry that a core ideological position has been judged to be inferior by the electorate.
And that’s how change for the better can occur.
Make no mistake, the more I think about this, the more convinced I become that the Pouliquin suit is one of the most important election law suits of the next 50 years.
1 A notable exception is Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who, after rejection by the Alaska Republicans in the primaries, won her seat on the strength of a write-in campaign in 2010. This exception is more a commentary on the weakness of the Democratic and official Republican candidates.
