Maine: Portland Still Counting Ballots in Mayoral Race | mpbn.net
On Election Night, Maine’s largest city popularly elected a mayor for the first time in eight decades. But who that person is won’t be publicly-known until later tonight, a day after the polls closed. Josie Huang has more. The city used a time-intensive electoral process called ranked-choice voting that’s has never been tried in Maine until now. Also known as instant run-off, it’s used in the U.S. by a dozen or so cities, such as San Francisco and Minneapolis.
Ranked choice voting is supposed to produce a winner that most voters can get behind, even if the candidate wasn’t their top choice. It works like this: Voters rank their favorite candidates, and the winner is whoever gets at least 50 percent of first-place votes. That was extremely unlikely to happen in Portland, where a staggering 15 candidates vied to be mayor.
