Ranked choice voting is marketed as a cure-all for a broken political system, promising to end partisan gridlock and ensure that every winning politician commands a true majority of the electorate. In Maine, the national laboratory for this voting experiment since its implementation in 2018, the reality is far messier. The system works by allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority of first-place votes initially, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed to the voters' next choices until someone crosses the 50 percent threshold.
Beneath the marketing lies a structural flaw that advocates routinely downplay. The system does not guarantee a true majority of all citizens who cast a ballot. Instead, it frequently delivers a majority of what remains after a significant percentage of votes are discarded along the way. This phenomenon is known as ballot exhaustion, and it is reshaping election outcomes by quietly removing thousands of voters from the final, decisive count.
The Illusion of the Majority
When voters go to the polls in a ranked choice election, they assume their ballot will matter until a winner is declared. That is not how the mechanics function.
If a voter chooses only one or two candidates in a crowded field, and those candidates are eliminated in early rounds, that ballot becomes exhausted. It is thrown into a metaphorical paper shredder before the final round of counting. The winner is then determined by calculating a majority based exclusively on the surviving ballots.
Consider a hypothetical municipal election with 10,000 total votes cast across four candidates.
- Candidate A gets 4,000 votes.
- Candidate B gets 3,500 votes.
- Candidate C gets 1,500 votes.
- Candidate D gets 1,000 votes.
No one has a majority. Candidate D is eliminated. If those 1,000 voters only chose Candidate D and left the rest of the ballot blank, those 1,000 ballots are now exhausted. The total pool of active ballots shrinks to 9,000. In the next round, Candidate C is eliminated, and let us assume 500 more ballots exhaust because those voters only liked Candidate C. The active pool is now 8,500.
When the final tally between Candidate A and Candidate B is calculated, the winning threshold is no longer 5,001 votes (a majority of the original 10,000). It is now 4,251 votes (a majority of the remaining 8,500). The politician who wins can claim they secured a majority of the vote, but they actually won a majority of a diminished pool. 1,500 citizens who participated in the election had no say in the final matchup.
This is not a minor technicality. It is the core engine of the system. By shrinking the denominator of the fraction, ranked choice voting manufactures a mathematical majority out of a plurality.
What Happened When Maine Went First
Maine became the ground zero for this debate during the 2018 midterm elections in its Second Congressional District. The incumbent Republican, Bruce Poliquin, won the most first-place votes in the initial round, leading Democrat Jared Golden by roughly 2,500 votes. Neither cleared the 50 percent mark because two independent candidates captured a combined 8 percent of the electorate.
When the machinery of ranked choice voting was activated, the independents were eliminated. Their ballots were unsealed, scanned, and redistributed.
Golden surged ahead in the subsequent rounds to win the seat. Poliquin filed a federal lawsuit, claiming the process violated the U.S. Constitution by denying voters a straightforward plurality election. The court rejected the challenge, establishing a legal precedent that state-level election design is well within the bounds of local authority.
The underlying data from that historic election revealed a troubling trend. More than 8,000 ballots were completely excluded from the final round because those voters opted not to rank either of the two major-party candidates. They wanted a third option, and when that option vanished, their political voice vanished with it. The final "majority" was an artificial construct.
The Ballot Complexity Tax
The system demands a higher cognitive load from the average voter. It requires citizens to research not just their favorite candidate, but an entire roster of hopefuls, some of whom represent fringe ideologies.
This complexity creates an unequal barrier to participation. Data from urban areas utilizing ranked choice systems shows that ballot errors—such as overvoting (ranking multiple candidates in the same slot) or skipping rankings—are disproportionately concentrated in lower-income precincts and communities with lower formal education levels.
Type of Ballot Error Resulting Action
--------------------- ---------------------------------------
Overvoting Ballot is immediately invalidated at that round
Skipping two rankings Ballot is treated as permanently exhausted
Bullet voting Ballot counts for one candidate, then drops out
When an election system inadvertently punishes voters who lack the time to dissect a multi-tiered tactical voting strategy, it fails the basic test of democratic accessibility. Traditional plurality voting is brutal and often results in winners who lack broad support, but its rules are transparently simple. You pick one person. The person with the most votes wins. Ranked choice voting introduces a layer of game theory to the ballot box that alienates the casual voter.
Partisan Realignment and Campaign Cynicism
Advocates argue that ranking preferences forces politicians to run more civil campaigns. The logic states that because a candidate needs the second-place endorsements of their rivals' supporters, they will refrain from negative mudslinging.
The reality on the ground in Maine and elsewhere suggests a different outcome. Instead of genuine civility, the system breeds strategic collusion.
Candidates frequently form tactical alliances that mimic corporate cartels. Two trailing candidates will hold joint press conferences, telling their respective bases to vote for them as number one and the other as number two, solely to block the frontrunner. This turns the democratic process into a game of survival alliances rather than a clear debate over policy.
Furthermore, the promised moderation of political discourse has not materialized. Polarized electorates continue to elect polarized figures. The system does not change the underlying cultural and political divisions of a district; it merely changes the math required to cross the finish line.
The Operational Burden on Local Government
Beyond the philosophical arguments, the logistical reality of managing these elections is a nightmare for small towns and rural municipalities.
Maine consists of hundreds of tiny townships, many governed by part-time clerks working with tight budgets. Processing ranked choice ballots requires specialized proprietary software and updated digital scanners. When an election goes to a second or third round, local town halls cannot simply count the paper slips by hand and report the numbers. The physical ballots or encrypted memory sticks must be securely transported to a central location in Augusta to be run through a unified state computer system.
This centralized processing delays election results for days, sometimes weeks. In an era where public trust in election integrity is fragile, a prolonged counting process conducted behind closed doors in a state capital invites conspiracy theories and deepens public skepticism. The longer it takes to deliver a final number, the easier it is for losing factions to claim the system was manipulated.
The financial cost is equally burdensome. Upgrading voting machines, retraining poll workers, and launching public education campaigns to teach voters how to fill out the new grids drains millions of dollars from local coffers. Those are resources that could otherwise fund schools, repair failing infrastructure, or improve basic public services.
Ranked choice voting fixes a theoretical problem with a highly complex mechanism, but the collateral damage to voter clarity, local budgets, and institutional trust is a steep price to pay for a manufactured majority.
