New England Republicans have one more chance to pick up a seat in the U.S. Congress out of the region’s otherwise across-the-board losses to Democrats.
The final hope comes from a tight race in Maine between incumbent Jared Golden and conservative challenger Bruce Poliquin, slated to be decided next week by ranked-choice voting (RCV), a growing trend across the United States in picking party candidates and general election winners in local, state, and federal elections.
“Ranked-choice voting gives voters more freedom over their voting and allows them to vote on their honest preferences, instead of voting strategically,” Deb Otis, research director of FairVote, told The Epoch Times.
Otis said FairVote, a national RCV advocacy group, is currently working on a campaign to replace traditional voting with ranked-choice voting in all 50 states.
RCV, which began in Australia about 100 years ago, is based on a second tally of ballots where voters were asked to rank candidates in order of preference at the time they were voting.
The second-round runoff is used when none of the candidates win a majority of votes.
In Maine, Golden is currently showing on top with 48.4 percent of the vote, Poliquin with 44.7 percent of the vote, and Independent Tiffany Bond with 6.9 percent of the vote.
Since Bond finished last, the second and third preferences voters listed on ballots cast for her will be added to Golden and/or Poliquin’s votes based on their preferred ranking.
With some irony, the last time Maine used rank-choice voting was in the match-off between Poliquin and Golden in the same race for the 2nd Congressional District seat in 2018.
Poliquin had won more votes than Poliquin but lost to Golden in the re-tabulation.
The RCV tabulation in the current contest between the two is scheduled to take place live on the morning of Nov. 15.
The count will be live-streamed on the Maine Secretary of State’s Facebook page, according to director of communications Emily Cook. A high-speed tabulator will be used with results expected, Cook told The Epoch Times, by the afternoon.
If Poliquin comes out on top, he will be the only Republican to win a federal office out of all six New England states. As it is now, Maine Congresswoman Susan Collins is the only elected Republican from New England in either the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives.
Maine is one of two states that use rank-choice voting to decide federal elections. The other is Alaska where RCV is being used to decide the U.S. House race involving former state governor and presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
Palin only won 26.6 percent of the vote against top vote earner Democrat Mary Peltola, who took 47.2 percent of the vote.
However, a third contender Nick Begich took 24.2 percent of the vote and a fourth candidate Chris Bye took 1.7 percent, leaving no one in the race with a majority vote and thus triggering ranked-choice voting to decide the election.
Under RCV, Palin could actually win if the majority of Begich voters chose her as the second choice.
That tabulation is slated to take place on Nov. 23.
Otis said that if Georgia had ranked-choice voting, voters wouldn’t have to incur the cost of a recount or “a long wait for that matter” in the undecided and intensely anticipated outcome of the race between Republican Herschel Walker and Democrat Raphael Warnock for the highly coveted U.S. Senate seat.
According to Otis, 60 U.S. cities and towns use RCV to decide elections, including New York City—which uses it in special elections.
Several states like Colorado and Minnesota have started using it to decide state elections while others use it to decide primaries such as Virginia, where RCV led to the GOP’s nominee of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who remains popular in the largely blue state.
According to FairVote, several more U.S. cities adopted RCV through ballot initiatives in last week’s midterm elections.
