By Stratton J. Davis

The Cotton Report

Maine has become the first and only state to use ranked-choice​ voting in this upcoming presidential election. This allows voters to vote for not just one presidential candidate but for multiple candidates, in the order they prefer them. This is very beneficial for third parties in America. ​“This is a tremendous opportunity to find out how many voters have secretly wanted to vote Libertarian, but have fallen for the ‘don’t waste your vote’ argument and voted for a Democrat or Republican instead,” said Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen.

Maine had voted to use ranked-choice voting​ in a 2016 ballot referendum. In 2017, a state law attempted to halt the new voting system in order to have time to amend the state’s constitution. In 2018, supporters of ranked-choice voting would vote to override the halting in a people’s veto referendum.

This is a huge slap in the face to the Democrat journalist ​Gordon L. Weil​, who is also ​a former Maine state agency head and municipal selectman. In 2015, when Maine was first considering using ranked-choice voting, Weil ​wrote an article​ where he said “​Ranked-choice voting is the flavor of the day. And it will turn out to have a bitter taste. Its advocates want to replace real democracy, in which a majority picks the winner, with something akin to a game show method of selection. The result could be more like ‘Family Feud’ than a decision about one of the most important choices people can make.”

Weil believes that we should stick to the way voting is handled in federal elections, as well as in most states. One of his problems with ranked-choice voting seems to be that when it is used, it sometimes results in there being many recounts, claiming “​the result was not transparent. Voters could not easily understand the process or know-how votes were counted. In a traditional election, it’s easy to know who got the most votes.”

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