RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.
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@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:
The Supreme Court of Maine has once again ruled on the constitutionality of Ranked Choice Voting, again finding it to be unconstitutional.
In 2017 they had ruled that RCV was not compatible with Maine's requirement for a Plurality winner (the candidate with the most votes wins). In RCV, ballots are initially counted as votes for first-choice candidates, but those same votes can later be transferred or discarded, meaning the final winner may not be the candidate who received the most votes as originally cast.
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It's worth noting that STAR Voting and Approval Voting both comply with the Maine Constitution's plurality winner rule. STAR Voting only finds the Plurality winner once, in the Automatic Runoff round. It clearly defines the vote as the runoff vote and defines scores as ballot data - not votes. Votes are never reassigned, transferred, or exhausted. Your vote goes to the finalist you prefer or counts as equal support for both, essentially like an abstain between those two. The candidate with the most votes wins.
This seems slightly tenuous. I don't think we can go by how STAR defines itself by saying that only the runoff is "the vote". Otherwise IRV / RCV could just redefine itself to declare that only the final runoff is "the vote".
The point is that it's surely about how this supreme court defines a vote, not how an individual voting method does.
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@toby-pereira
In RCV a vote is the voters top choice in the first round and each round following. The first round finds the Plurality winner and if that candidate has a majority of active votes the election is called right then and there, but if that winner has a plurality of votes but not a majority of active votes, the system may reject that and go on to find a separate winner by reallocating or exhausting those votes. That's why it's not a Plurality method.In STAR Voting the first round never determines a winner because votes haven't been awarded to candidates yet. That always happens only once in STAR Voting and the candidate with the most votes always wins.
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@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:
@toby-pereira
In RCV a vote is the voters top choice in the first round and each round following. The first round finds the Plurality winner and if that candidate has a majority of active votes the election is called right then and there, but if that winner has a plurality of votes but not a majority of active votes, the system may reject that and go on to find a separate winner by reallocating or exhausting those votes. That's why it's not a Plurality method.In STAR Voting the first round never determines a winner because votes haven't been awarded to candidates yet. That always happens only once in STAR Voting and the candidate with the most votes always wins.
Right, so you're saying that because the IRV counting process could end after any round, it is necessary to call each round a vote.
However, IRV does not need to use the counting process where it stops in the round when a candidate first has a majority. It could just continue until there are two candidates left and just call that final round "the vote". It would never affect the (first place) result, but would just require a bit of extra counting.
But regardless, as I say, I'm not sure a voting method's own definition of what a vote is would hold any weight against what a court says a vote is.
And even if we allow that, by calling just the final run-off in STAR the vote, the method is also excluding most of the candidates from the voting process, which I think might be considered unconstitutional.
Obviously it's not me you would be arguing against, but these are just things that I can imagine might come up.
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@toby-pereira I’m sure the courts will conjure up whatever question-begging definition of vote they need to for whatever ruling they decided on beforehand. I think getting the reasonable notions settled on to facilitate progress without constitutional amendments will require more lawyering than only appeals to reason. It’s unfortunate that Maine’s constitution encoded plurality into its state voting law, I think it’s important to know what other states might have this same kind of language issue in their constitutions.
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@cfrank Sara and I disagree on the terminology. My position is that the qualifier Ware makes clear what tallying is called in. So, Ware RCV for the specific system that Rob Ritchie & co. are promoting.
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In the Electoral Methods e-mail broadcast, Etjon Basha asks, "So, not even approval would pass? Nothing beyond plurality?".
Approval, Score, STAR [10], other Shentrup/Frohnmayer balance-compliant systems [9]; everything else [0].
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@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:
It's really important to differentiate from Ranked Choice Voting, so it's really important that we stop using the term for other ranked methods.
I think a much better strategy is to just ask "which type of ranked choice voting?" Because 90% of people who like "RCV" have only a superficial understanding of the topic and aren't thinking beyond the ranked ballot, and this keeps them open to considering alternative methods of tallying those ballots. As a friend said to me in person "I don't know about all that, I just want to rank the candidates".
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Etjon Basha asks, "So, not even approval would pass? Nothing beyond plurality?".
In this context, "plurality" doesn't mean "Choose One Only" Voting or FPTP. Plurality means a class of systems where the candidate with the most votes wins, as opposed to "majority" voting systems in which the candidate with the majority of votes cast wins.
Approval is a plurality method.
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@psephomancy Even if we wanted to, redefining the term "Ranked Choice Voting" isn't within our power. They have clear and defensible trademark over the term, which again, was coined specifically for IRV, not to mention name recognition for RCV by millions of people that they've invested millions of dollars to build.
Terminology in voting science is already so jumbled. Conflating good ranked methods (Condorcet) with Ranked Choice Voting (IRV & STV) or Instant Runoff Voting (IRV only) is only going to hurt the better options in the scenarios where RCV is a dirty word, while in contexts where RCV is well regarded, conflating better ranked methods serves no benefit because RCV dwarfs all the other alternatives in terms of name recognition and market dominance.
Our only way forward here is to out RCV as the outdated and oversold method that it is, position better alternatives as the successor, and move forward from there. Strategically.
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@toby-pereira Anything can be argued and counter-argued in court, but my assessment above is based on what a fair and likely ruling would be, in my professional opinion.
I'm not a lawyer, but have been studying these things for years and we did win the case in the Oregon Supreme Court against the Oregon Legislative Council which found that RCV's ballot title in Oregon was misleading and inaccurate as it pertains to RCV's majority winner claims, though there is apparently no mechanism anymore to enforce such a ruling.
Two confounding data points:
- RCV has spent years making the argument that RCV guarantees majority winners. That's directly at odds with an argument that it guarantees plurality winners. Ironically, there's a solid case to be made that due to exhausted ballots it guarantees neither.
- The Constitution of Maine Article IV, Section 5 requires that winners be elected "by a plurality of ALL votes returned.” In cases like these where the wording is explicit that it's "all" votes "returned" or all votes "cast" RCV is eliminated from compliance by the existence of exhausted ballots alone.
