Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has qualified for the Maine Presidential ballot in November and in doing so shows just how fraudulent claims in favor of Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) really are.
Supporters of RCV falsely promise it will reduce toxic partisanship, increase compromise, and eliminate extremism from our elections, but in reality the costly, confusing, and complex voting practice has been an unmitigated disaster wherever implemented.
RCV requires a voter to rank each candidate on the basis of ‘least bad’ by assigning a numerical designation to the candidate the voter favors most to the candidate the voter favors least. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and each ballot cast for that candidate is reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.
What happens when a voter does not rank every candidate, and his choices are eliminated? The ballot is deemed ‘exhausted’ and is thrown out. Meaning, as designed RCV manufactures a majority winner by routinely discarding thousands of ballots so candidates need only win a majority of the remaining votes, not a majority of all votes cast.
Let’s look at a potential outcome in Maine in which RFK, Jr. gets enough votes to keep either Trump or Harris from winning a majority in the first round. Say 48% of Maine voters choose Trump and list RFK Jr. as their second choice, and 48% of Harris voters list RFK Jr. as their second choice. Given the animosity between Democrats and Republicans, many voters fail to list a third choice.
So who wins the election? Not RFK Jr., who under this scenario upwards of 90% of voters chose as a reasonable compromise. As the last place finisher, he’s already been eliminated. Whoever the RFK Jr. voters chose as their second-place choice wins the election.
Who loses the election? The thousands of disenfranchised voters of Maine whose ballots were thrown out to satisfy the RCV system employed invariably to push our politics to the Left.
But Maine has been witness to the RCV catastrophe already. In the state’s 2018 Maine congressional race, then-incumbent GOP Rep. Bruce Poliquin lost to Democrat Jared Golden despite Poliquin winning the most votes in the first round of voting. In fact, more than 8,000 ballots were deemed “exhausted” and thrown out because voters didn’t list a choice vote—thus manufacturing a “majority” for Poliquin’s challenger.
There are changes to our elections that would make it easy to vote and harder to cheat, such as Voter ID, clean and updated voter rolls, preventing non-citizens from voting, strict adherence to voting laws, eliminating unmanned and unmonitored drop boxes, and so much more.
But the RCV scheme is never workable. Let’s hope other states can learn from Maine’s mistake.
Ken Cuccinelli is the former Virginia Attorney General and Acting Deputy Sectary of the Department of Homeland Security and is now leading the Election Transparency Initiative.