Ranked-Choice Voting, Finally
The system that made me excited to vote.
Today is Election Day for Maine’s Democratic primary and I had the opportunity to vote for who I want to challenge Susan Collins and potentially take her spot in the Senate in January 2021.
This primary election composed of three candidates, two progressives and one more center-left. In past elections, the choice of who to vote for would normally come down to electability and I would have put my support entirely behind a candidate who may not align as much with my values and politics.
However, this was not the case as Maine now has a system of ranked-choice voting. This system, which was supported by a popular vote in 2016, allows voters to rank the candidates in a race rather than just choosing their top candidate.
The votes are then counted in rounds. If no candidate reaches more than 50% of votes in a round, then the candidate with the least votes gets eliminated and anyone who voted for them for their first choice gets their vote redistributed to their second choice. This automatic runoff allows voters to express their thoughts and vote for who they want without risking a vote split and involuntarily helping the candidate who they like the least.
While this system was first used in statewide races in Maine in 2018 and in the presidential Democratic primary in March, I didn’t really feel excited to use it until today’s election. As a progressive voter, I love to hear ideas like Medicare For All, student loan forgiveness, and the Green New Deal being supported by various candidates in an election. This left me with two choices who I would be happy to have represent me and my state for four or more years in the United States Senate.
With ranked-choice voting, I could focus more on their policies and who they are rather than how they were doing in polling and fundraising. This is the part of ranked-choice voting that really excites me.
So for the first time that I can really remember during an election, I got to really think about who I’d prefer to represent me. The choices for me came down to the two progressive candidates, Bre Kidman and Betsy Sweet. While both of these candidates support progressive ideals and promise that they would fight for them if elected, their backgrounds do differ from one another.
Bre Kidman’s candidacy really excited me and made me want to vote in this primary. Bre is an activist and a public attorney which is another similarity that they have with Betsy Sweet. They also are a millennial and the first openly gender non-binary candidate to run for the US Senate in history.
These last two personal traits are what made me put Bre as my first choice candidate. I have never before had the opportunity to back a millennial or an openly LGBTQIA+ candidate in an election. Because of ranked-choice voting, I was able to do so and vote for someone who represents me in more ways than just politically. Without this system, I would have been left deciding based on polling or on how my preferred candidates might be perceived by the rest of the voting public based on parts of their identities such as age, gender, or race.
Ranked-choice voting should be the future of voting in the United States. It will give every voter the chance to support candidates who they truly support and lead to a wider variety of candidates in elections with different backgrounds and politics. This is a change that our system needs to make us more excited and hopeful in our votes.
