Maine Democrat Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) won a third term in the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 16, defeating Republican challenger Bruce Poliquin in the state’s 2nd Congressional District, the largest district east of the Mississippi River.
Golden finished the race with 53 percent of the total, or 165,136 votes, in ranked-choice voting, to defeat Poliquin, a former congressman, who ended up with 146,142 votes, or almost 47 percent.
After three days of collecting, checking, verifying, and re-scanning of votes, Golden was declared the winner.
“I am deeply honored that the people of Maine’s Second District have chosen me to represent them in Washington for another two-year term,” Golden said in a written statement after final results were announced.
The entire region voted blue in federal elections. Currently, Rep. Susan Collins (R-Maine) remains the only New England Republican to hold federal office.
Ranked-choice voting is triggered when no candidate wins a majority, or more than 50 percent of the vote. When it kicks in, second- and third-choice candidates selected by voters on their ballots are reallocated to the top candidates.
In Maine, the 21,581 votes won by independent Tiffany Bond were reassigned to Golden and Poliquin, based on which candidate was ranked as a second and third preference to Bond.
Going into the retabulation, Golden had won the most votes with 48.2 percent of the vote to Poliquin’s 44.9 percent.
Some missing votes did turn up in the retabulation, according to Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, including ballots contained on an absentee ballot stick from Lewiston, one of rural New England’s largest cities by population.
There were also seven missing votes discovered from the reported race results in the small town of Palermo.
Bellows, who hosted a three-day livestream of the ranked-choice voting on Facebook, explained that the missing votes were from ballots that for various reasons were rejected by ballot machines.
“We want this count to be accurate. We want voters to know your vote will be counted and that your vote counts,” she told viewers watching the livestream.
“That is why we are making sure we have every single ballot. That is why we are doing ranked-choice voting. That’s why we care about those seven votes.”
Maine uses RCV to decide federal races, but not state elections.
Some Maine Republicans say there are some unexplainable discrepancies in state elections, pointing out that election results in traditionally red towns such as Maine’s many fishing communities show voters voted Republican in federal races but for Democrats in state races.
Tiffany Treck, co-founder of Health Choice Maine, told The Epoch Times that while she voted for Republican Paul LePage for governor in her town of Lamoine, local election results are showing zero votes for the former Maine governor.
“Not to sound like I’m trying to be funny, but there’s something fishy going on,” Treck said.
Lamoine is a small coastal community that sits at the head of Frenchman’s Bay in Hancock County, which is part of the district won by Golden.
Advocates for ranked-choice voting say it’s more accurate and also a quicker means to decide races in which there was no majority winner, while others have called it unconstitutional because it potentially deprives the candidate who took the most votes in the main election of a win.
Ranked-choice voting is being used to decide other pending elections, including the Alaska congressional race between one-time vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin and Mary Peltola.
The runoff in that race is slated for Nov. 23.
While Peltola won 20 percent more votes than Palin, it’s possible that Palin could make up that difference in an RCV runoff.
