I’ll start with an admission: I genuinely like Jared Golden. To be clear, I view the manner in which he was elected to Congress to be repellent and illegitimate and I think that Bruce Poliquin should be the 2nd Congressional District representative right now. But Golden is a really decent person. He is pleasant, and […]
Christmas is a time for giving, and boldly predicting what will happen next year has been my gift to you every year since 2011. As usual, I got a lot right last year. I told you what would happen in the Republican primary, that there would be a ranked-choice voting people’s veto, that 2018 would be a bad election year for […]
Tuesday of this week, the state of Mississippi did it the right way. Earlier in the month, on the day we all went to the polls, Mississipians held a special election for the seat left vacated by the resignation of US Sen. Thad Cochran. Four candidates ran for the seat, each running on a non-partisan […]
In a surprise to exactly no one, Bruce Poliquin filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday, challenging Maine’s ranked-choice voting system. Contrary to the already developing narrative being used by some, this suit is not being filed because Poliquin is a “sore loser” — indeed, it is being filed as he stands the plurality […]
More than a week, and no winner. Glitches. Memory stick problems. Ballots sent by courier from remote Maine towns. And all for likely selecting the winner that would have been selected anyway under the old system? This is really how you want to do elections, Maine? Maine’s first experiment with ranked choice voting hasn’t exactly […]
After all that, it turns out the Republicans don’t need to worry about the foolishness of ranked-choice voting after all. The reason for that, of course, is that Shawn Moody became the Republican nominee for governor on Tuesday night by absolutely wiping out his opponents. And that is no small accomplishment this year, because Moody […]
Well, the legal battles over ranked-choice voting have already gotten absurdly messy and confusing, and the system hasn’t even been used in an actual election yet. Just wait until the loser ends up miraculously becoming a winner in an election. That should be fun. In the last week a lot has happened, and to fully […]
Ladies and gentlemen, it is that time of year again. Yes, the time of year you all look forward to with ever-growing excitement. I’m speaking, of course, of my annual bold predictions, where I give you, dear reader, a foretelling of the coming year. This has been my gift to you every year since 2011. Last year, I […]
Well, I hate to say I told you so. But, I told you so. I tried. I tried to warn you all that ranked-choice voting was unconstitutional. Said I, in late October of last year, “The language [in the Maine Constitution], however, is not about defining the upper limit of vote totals necessary to win. […]
