Friday, July 31, 2020
Maine: Secretary of State Matt Dunlap may have disqualified legitimate signatures on a petition to get ranked choice voting on the ballot. "Through a meticulous investigation by our team and volunteers, we have found and verified that thousands of registered Maine voters’ signatures were improperly deemed invalid." The Fulcrum
Strange bedfellows department: It's not often I find myself agreeing with J. Christian Adams, but this is worth looking into, as well as his digging into dead people on the voting rolls in chicago.
Strange bedfellows department: It's not often I find myself agreeing with J. Christian Adams, but this is worth looking into, as well as his digging into dead people on the voting rolls in chicago.
Secretary of State Matt Dunlap announced Wednesday that a petition drive to block the use of RCV for president this fall had come up 2,000 signatures short of the 63,000 ultimately required.
That amounts to a significant symbolic victory for those who view ranking elections as one of the best ways to bolster democracy, because the system tends to reduce partisan polarization and reward centrist candidates. Mainers have been in the vanguard of the effort to expand use of RCV, adopting it for virtually all contests four years ago and implementing it statewide in 2018, despite a handful of legal and legislative challenges.
Last month, when ballot petitions were due for submission, the state Republican Party reported it had collected 72,000 signatures. But state officials tossed 11,000 of them because they were not properly certified by the registrar or were duplicative.
But Maine GOP Chairwoman Demi Kouzounas said the fight is not over. "It is abundantly clear" that the secretary of state, a Democrat, "used every trick in the book to throw out enough signatures through a litany of technicalities to keep this question off the ballot," Kouzounas said.
Sufficient signatures would have ordered a referendum in November on whether to use ranked voting in future presidential contests — and suspended the use of the system this time.
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