Maine’s 2nd District Enters Ranked-Choice Count After LePage Leads First Round

Paul LePage finished more than 5,000 votes ahead of Matt Dunlap. Dunlap conceded. Then Maine cleared its throat and explained that none of that quite counted.

LePage took 49.894 percent of ballots cast — close enough to a majority to make the shortfall look like a technicality, far enough to trigger the ritual this state now performs when a first-round leader lands a sliver under the line. The Secretary of State began the ranked-choice tabulation Monday. LePage is already in Washington, talking about working with moderate Democrats. His campaign is confident. Everyone is performing certainty while the official result remains a math problem.

Some of that performance is LePage’s own fault. Declaring victory before certification, in a state whose election law is built to second-guess election night, is chest-thumping that hands opponents a clip. Republicans who argue that this system detaches outcomes from the plain tally should not treat the plain tally as a coronation. Follow the statute. Then get rid of the statute.

The statute is the problem. Ranked-choice voting was sold as majority rule without the mess of a runoff. What it does is decline to accept the candidate the most voters marked first, collect lower rankings many voters never expected to matter, throw out ballots that named none of the survivors, and declare a majority of whatever is left. Exhausted ballots do not get a seat at the final percentage. They vanish from the denominator. That is a very convenient way to manufacture the majority you promised on the brochure.

Maine’s 2nd District does not have to imagine where this can lead. In 2018 Bruce Poliquin finished ahead of Jared Golden. The ranked-choice count finished Poliquin. A federal court let it stand. Democrats called it democracy. Voters who had watched a Republican lead learned that the lead was provisional, subject to the redistribution of preferences cast for candidates who had already lost. Call it a feature if you like. In this district it is a precedent, and precedents are why people do not relax when the Secretary of State says the count is merely continuing.

The serious defense should be met, not sneered past. Maine voters adopted ranked-choice voting. A concession is a political act, not a legal one. Everyone who ran knew the 50 percent rule. A plurality is not a majority, and 49.894 is not 50. If the tabulation confirms LePage, the delay will have been irritating rather than decisive. If it reverses him, the system will have done what its authors designed: deny the seat to the first-round leader when a constructed majority of continuing ballots prefers someone else.

Design is not the same thing as consent in any sense an ordinary voter recognizes. Ask the Mainer who filled in one oval whether they agreed to have that ballot dropped from the deciding math because they declined to rank a candidate they did not want. Ask whether a man who conceded should be revivable by second choices from candidates who already lost. The reformer’s answer is a seminar. The voter’s answer is that they picked a candidate, that candidate was ahead by thousands, the other man quit, and the state is still counting as if the tally were a suggestion.

This is not fraud, and Republicans who reach for that word are doing the other side’s work — turning a real institutional failure into a cartoon. The failure is plainer. It is a ballot regime that prolongs uncertainty, confuses consent, and has already moved this district’s seat from the candidate with the most first-place votes to the candidate without them. No conspiracy is required. The machinery is working as built. That is the indictment.

There is a cost past one seat. Every time a conceded race is hauled back for retabulation, another slice of the public learns that election night is theater and the real election is an administrative round most people will not watch and do not understand. Trust is not a press release about process. Trust is a result that matches the count people witnessed. Ranked-choice voting is at war with that standard, and it calls the war civic improvement.

LePage should be certified if the rankings say so, and he should lose if they do not — under the law Maine has, not the law Republicans wish it had this week. But a Right that cares about self-government will not spend the week merely cheering a former governor’s lead. It will say what the lead exposes: a voting system that can look at a 5,000-vote margin and a concession and call both incomplete. That is not neutral sophistication. It is a delay, a distortion, and, in this district, a lesson Maine has already been taught once.