I am not a fan of ranked-choice voting. Voters need to study all the candidates more than they do now in regular elections. Winning a ranked-choice voting election after finishing fourth in the votes would create the same kind of dissatisfaction that occurred in the 2010 election.

The ranked-choice voting initiative gained momentum after conservative Paul LePage was elected governor in 2010 without a clear majority in a five-way race. LePage received only 38 percent of the votes. Ranked-choice voting was conceived although the Maine Constitution mandates that the plurality candidate is the winner in state-level elections. In 2016, a people’s referendum made ranked-choice voting the law in Maine.

After the Maine Supreme Judicial Court issued an advisory ruling that it would find ranked-choice voting largely unconstitutional, the Maine Legislature passed a bill that defers implementation of ranked-choice voting until 2021 and provides time to fix the Maine Constitution.

Supporters of ranked-choice voting reacted to the legislation by initiating a people’s veto referendum designed to save the new voting measure. The vote will take place June 12.

The Maine Constitution needs fixing. I suppose that the framers of the Maine Constitution, being frugal New Englanders, decided that one election was good enough. In today’s more complex society with a fractured electorate, plurality winners are no longer good enough.

We now have time to make a change to the Maine Constitution adding runoff elections in selected cases when a plurality winner occurs. With all its problems, at least the results of a runoff election are clear and unambiguous. The candidate with the majority of votes wins. The losers just need to try harder the next time.

Peter Konieczko

Scarborough