Monthly Archives: November 2018

Ranked-choice voting is awful, but true runoffs aren’t

Tuesday of this week, the state of Mississippi did it the right way. Earlier in the month, on the day we all went to the polls, Mississipians held a special election for the seat left vacated by the resignation of US Sen. Thad Cochran. Four candidates ran for the seat, each running on a non-partisan […]

Don’t learn the wrong lessons from this election

Want to hear an interesting fact about the 2018 election? Shawn Moody received the fourth most votes for governor in the nearly 200 years of Maine history. Obviously, one of the people who received more votes than he did was Janet Mills, the woman who defeated him in that contest. The other two were Paul […]

Poliquin right to challenge ranked-choice voting

In a surprise to exactly no one, Bruce Poliquin filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday, challenging Maine’s ranked-choice voting system. Contrary to the already developing narrative being used by some, this suit is not being filed because Poliquin is a “sore loser” — indeed, it is being filed as he stands the plurality […]

There was no blue wave, except in Maine

Going into Tuesday’s election, there were a lot of predictions. A lot of polls. A lot of prognostication. The conventional wisdom was that we would see a Democratic tidal wave across the nation, sea to sea, from the House to the Senate to state governorships. Yes, I grant you, there was more pessimism in the […]