Fried, Glover write piece on ranked-choice voting for The American Prospect
Amy Fried, a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Maine, and Rob Glover, an associate professor of political science at UMaine, wrote a piece on ranked-choice voting for The American Prospect. More than a dozen U.S. cities use ranked-choice voting, but Maine is the first state to implement it, having done so in the recent primary election. Proponents of ranked-choice voting have argued that the system better represents the popular will, and will ensure that candidates receive a majority of votes rather than a plurality, though the issue became somewhat partisan in Maine and could have unforeseen consequences, according to the article. “It remains unclear whether Maine’s innovative democratic experiment could travel to other states. Its partial adoption here has been driven by Maine’s political idiosyncrasies,” the article states. “The shift is rooted in a political culture that values and encourages participation.” Ranked-choice voting could increase “civility and moderation” in the election process, but it is too early to ascertain for sure the larger impacts this could have. Fried and Glover write that primary elections tend to draw more active and knowledgeable voters, so until ranked-choice voting is used in a general election its true effects will still be undetermined. However, they say, “this experiment in Maine’s ‘laboratory of democracy’ provides a crucial test case for states and localities seeking to transform their electoral processes to better reflect the will of the people.”