The July edition of The Maine Monitor Radio Hour features a recent panel discussion on ranked-choice voting hosted at the University of New England's Portland campus by The Maine Monitor as part of its ongoing series of Monitor Talks.
During the event, moderated by The Monitor's elections and government reporter Matt Junker, panelists examined the ranked-choice voting strategies that came into play in Maine's June primary, debated whether the process makes candidates and campaigns more inclined to keep things civil, and looked at potential improvements the state could make to expedite the timeline for tabulating results.
The panelists were Ron Schmidt, a political science professor at the University of Southern Maine; Chrissy Hart, the executive director of Democracy Maine; and Aaron Chadbourne, who was a policy advisor to former Gov. Paul LePage and now works in real estate.
"What we saw in this primary election was that RCV was incredibly useful in both the Republican and Democratic gubernatorial primaries," said Hart, whose organization Democracy Maine encompasses the League of Women Voters of Maine, Maine Citizens for Clean Elections and Maine Students Vote. "It made them competitive, it made them interesting, it made them collegial, and it resulted in two candidates who had a significant majority share of the votes."
Chadbourne, who was working in the LePage administration when Maine voters approved ranked-choice voting via referendum, said he was "a bit agnostic" as to whether ranked-choice voting is better or worse than other voting systems in theory. For him, the big issue is that some people still don't understand exactly how ranked-choice voting works.
Schmidt, from USM, said it will take time to see the full effect ranked-choice voting has had on the way campaigns are run and the way voters approach the process.
You can listen to the episode here. Tune in to listen live the first Thursday of every month at 4 p.m. on WERU 89.9 FM.