[EL] RCV in Maine and Third-Party Spoilers

[Kogan, Vladimir]

I wanted to flag the election results in Maine's 2nd Congressional District, where ranked-choice voting was used. Four candidates ran - one Democrat, one Republican, two independents. Here are the results:


Round 1

Round 2

Candidate Names

Votes

Percentage

Transfer

Votes

Percentage

Transfer

Bond, Tiffany L.

16260

05.73%

-16260

0

00.00%

0

DEM Golden, Jared F.

128999

45.48%

10232

139231

50.53%

0

Hoar, William R.S.

6753

02.38%

-6753

0

00.00%

0

REP Poliquin, Bruce

131631

46.41%

4695

136326

49.47%

0


Several things worth highlighting: (1) The "ballot exhaustion" rate was fairly low, about 2.8% of valid first-round votes; (2) the victor still did not win a majority of valid first-round votes; (3) by my calculation 35% (!) of voters who picked one of the independents as their #1 choice did not subsequently rank either the Democrat or Republican in a lower-ranked position.

I bring this up in response to the argument that RCV is a solution to the problem of third-party spoilers (who syphon off enough votes from one major-party candidate to lose him/her the election). Of course, all of those 35% may not have voted at all had the independent candidates not run; or perhaps they would've voted for Bond or Hoar even in the absence of RCV (assuming, of course, that Bond and Hoar would've still run had the election not been held under RCV...). But I thought this was worth flagging.

Note: This is not meant to be a general indictment of RCV or an argument that RCV is worse than the alternative.

Vlad

[The Ohio State University]
Vladimir Kogan, Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
2004 Derby Hall | 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210-1373
510/415-4074 Mobile
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http://u.osu.edu/kogan.18/
kogan.18 at osu.edu<mailto:kogan.18 at osu.edu>
[Twitter icon]@vkoganosu<https://twitter.com/vkoganosu>


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