[EM] Maine RCV

[Etjon Basha]

Good evening gentlemen,

This whole situation led me to think of how might someone dead-set on IRV
get around this, which would obviously be through runoff voting.

Which in turn made me think of runoff itself, and how it's an inefficient
way to parse a crowded field of candidates in round one. Once you get to
round two, there's no games left to play, and a contest between two parties
only is at least immune to on-the-day voter strategy.

Of course, if we let more candidates than two survive the first round, we
would suffer from potentially fewer failures on round 1, but potentially
more on round 2.

So, which is the optimal way to minimise the total strategizing across two
rounds?

Three candidates? However many top-voted collectively clear half the votes
cast? Any other ideas? Or is "top two" likely the best compromise anyway?

Regards,

Etjon

On Wed, 15 Apr 2026, 8:59 pm Etjon Basha, <etjonbasha at gmail.com> wrote:

> Greetings gentleman,
>
> And thanks Rob,
>
> So, not even approval would pass? Nothing beyond plurality?
>
> On Wed, 15 Apr 2026, 6:08 pm Rob Lanphier via Election-Methods, <
> election-methods at lists.electorama.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> Interesting report by Sara Wolk on votingtheory.org:
>>
>> https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/606/rcv-found-unconstitutional-in-maine
>>
>> In short: the Maine legislature decided to expand RCV/IRV beyond federal
>> offices to state and local offices, but worried about both a governor's
>> veto, and/or an overturn from Maine's high court (the "SJC" or "Supreme
>> Judicial Court").  So, rather than sending it to the governor (whose veto
>> could be for many reasons), they sent it to the SJC first.  The SJC said "*The
>> Maine Constitution, construed as a whole, treats a 'vote' as a single
>> choice, tallied by a municipality*"  That not only has implications for
>> RCV, but many other systems too.  A brief explainer with direct links the
>> SJC opinion and some key quotes from them is available on electowiki:
>> https://electowiki.org/wiki/Maine#2026_advisory_opinion
>>
>> The "*tallied by a municipality*" caveat is interesting, since it
>> implies precinct summability is important to the SJC.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>> Rob
>> p.s. my cursory investigation of this topic was in preparation for the
>> ElectoramaCall, which is happening in a few hours:
>> https://electowiki.org/wiki/ElectoramaCall
>> ----
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>
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