Forum Council

The Supreme Court of Maine has once again ruled on the constitutionality of Ranked Choice Voting, again finding it to be unconstitutional.

In 2017 they had ruled that RCV was not compatible with Maine's requirement for a Plurality winner (the candidate with the most votes wins). In RCV, ballots are initially counted as votes for first-choice candidates, but those same votes can later be transferred or discarded, meaning the final winner may not be the candidate who received the most votes as originally cast.

“The Constitution requires that the person elected shall be the candidate who receives a plurality of all the votes.”
“Under the ranked-choice voting system… if no candidate receives a majority of first choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and the votes cast for that candidate are redistributed to the voters’ next choices.”
“It is therefore possible that the candidate who receives the greatest number of first choice votes will not be declared the winner.”
“Because the Act requires the Secretary of State to determine the winner… by eliminating candidates and redistributing votes until one candidate receives a majority, the [Ranked Choice Voting] Act is not consistent with the provisions of the Constitution that require election by plurality.”
-Opinion of the Justices (Maine 2017 RCV Advisory Opinion)

The new 2026 ruling takes a look at the conflicting Alaska court ruling on the same subject and once again rules that RCV can find and then reject the plurality winner in favor of someone else.

The new ruling also goes deeper into the 2nd RCV constitutional issue, regarding centralization of ballots required under RCV.

Article IV, Part First, § 5 (House)

“The votes shall be received, sorted, counted and declared in open ward, town and plantation meetings…”

Article IV, Part Second, § 3 (Senate)

“The votes shall be received, sorted, counted and declared in the same manner as votes for Representatives…”

Article V, Part First, § 3 (Governor)

“The votes shall be received, sorted, counted and declared… and the lists of votes shall be sealed and returned to the Secretary of State…”

RCV does not allow for local tabulation of ballots due to the fact that a local or subset of ballots isn't enough to determine the order of elimination, thus there's no way to know which rankings and transfers should be counted and which ballots should be exhausted until the central tally is complete. The Maine Constitution requires that votes be counted and declared by local officials as cast, with those results transmitted to the state.

This has massive implications for RCV nationwide. 39 states include a clause of some sort requiring Plurality winners in their elections. 8 states include a clause requiring local tabulation and reporting of vote totals in their constitutions.

RCV also violates common clauses in state constitutions that Maine doesn't have, including "vote for one" clauses, "count all votes" clauses, and "Equal Vote" clauses. Many more states have laws similar to those above that implicitly exclude RCV, and now 19 states have explicit bans on RCV.

For decades the argument in the voting reform community has been that we should go with RCV (despite warnings from the electoral science community) because of momentum. I think that argument can now officially be laid to rest.

It's worth noting that STAR Voting and Approval Voting both comply with the Maine Constitution's plurality winner rule. STAR Voting only finds the Plurality winner once, in the Automatic Runoff round. It clearly defines the vote as the runoff vote and defines scores as ballot data - not votes. Votes are never reassigned, transferred, or exhausted. Your vote goes to the finalist you prefer or counts as equal support for both, essentially like an abstain between those two. The candidate with the most votes wins.

STAR also is compatible with local tabulation of ballots, (subtallies report score totals for each candidate and a voter preference table). In STAR all ballot data is fully counted and used.

It's time that we as a movement recognize that RCV is a dead end and stop throwing good money after bad.

https://ballot-access.org/2026/04/07/maine-supreme-judicial-court-again-says-ranked-c[…]l-elections-for-state-office-unless-constitution-is-changed/

I have an idea I’m trying to flesh out properly, maybe some others’ thoughts can help.

The idea is to group voters by ballot type (or latent preference but that’s not observable), and then view the issue of participation as an adversarial game among those groups.

As a strategy, each group chooses how many of their ballots to cast (and how many to abstain). In a more complicated scenario, the groups could also choose how to distribute the ballots they cast among the other ballot types, but that’s probably too much.

This is a large game but it’s finite, so it has a Nash equilibrium over mixed strategies. Any equilibrium induces a lottery over decisions.

In principle, this is something that could be simulated. Say as a big ask that group utility functions were set up normatively or faithfully enough. Then under certain assumptions, a method that simulated the equilibrium strategies over groups would “essentially” satisfy participation, since casting a ballot would only give one’s group an extra pure strategy to sample from.

Roughly, I’m considering whether the no-show/abstention problem can be all but artificially removed under certain assumptions about group utility functions, and whether those assumptions are reasonable enough or not.

It could be that there is some recursive issue of meta participation. In fact, I think that even casting a ballot and allowing it to be a strategic option for one’s group can change the game globally as other groups adjust, which may mean the problem persists unless perhaps other conditions are met… In a zero-sum situation, I don’t think increased optionality can reduce the equilibrium payoff for a group.

@toby-pereira I see, it seems that the properties of maximal lotteries related to participation aren’t what I believed they were. Looking into this, I misunderstood the definition of an (x,y)-improvement, this is swapping the adjacent positions of x and y in a ballot that already exists in the election, not introducing a new ballot where x>y.

That’s unfortunate, but also makes sense.

Just bumping this thread because of a discussion on the EM mailing list about participation.

While it is claimed that this method passes participation, the discussions very much led to the conclusion that it does not, unless defined in a very weak way.

There are situations where someone's expected utility can be reduced by voting.

It might be that given we don't know from the ballot what the utilities are, there is a possible way to come up with utilities so that participation would not be violated. But that's just the same as saying that we can't prove from the ballot information alone that participation has not been violated. Very weak.

The discussion is from here onwards.

@cse4129 no problem, that’s what forums are for! Your idea is good, it just happens it was already invented. It also does have some problems/failed properties, though (like any method).

For example, it isn’t Condorcet compliant or Condorcet loser compliant, and it fails participation. It doesn’t satisfy independence of clones either, and it fails various other binary criteria. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad method, but it means it can occasionally produce pathological results. It satisfies the majority winner and majority loser criterion, and later-no-help.

There’s a “mind map” I made some years ago of some of the best-known/characterized voting systems in terms of the binary criteria they satisfy and fail in that discussion above. Probably nowadays I would make a better one (I might at some point). I should have done something like PCA or a graph embedding, but I tried to make that map before I knew about those analysis methods.

@cse4129 I took a brief look and will check in more detail, but from the initial look it reminds me of Bucklin voting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucklin_voting

This is an exploratory discussion about mapping out voting systems, I think it’s good to be familiar with the major systems described there and generally what kinds of properties they have:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/280/map-of-voting-systems?_=1775264773769

@robla It is the "Electorama" area on Discord.

https://discord.gg/CNp3vjhB

@toby-pereira your interpretation is correct, and yes with an even number of voters and non-strict rankings, ties can occur and that can induce non-uniqueness. For example there may be two separate, disconnected Condorcet cycles of different sizes in the Smith set for instance. The proof of uniqueness in general is probably less straightforward than just the intuition, I haven’t dug into it.

With ties in other methods, the resolution of ties is typically standard because the set over which the ties occur is discrete—uniformly sample one from among the tied candidates. But for maximal lotteries, when non-uniqueness holds there is a continuum of admissible lotteries as you indicated. The analog of a uniform distribution in this case would be using Jeffrey’s prior, which is why I think that’s the “right” way to go.

But yes it ultimately doesn’t really matter how the maximal lottery used is chosen since they are all maximal, but that’s also kind of the issue, because a choice has to be made.