For all the noise of a presidential election week, the salient point in Maine four days after the Nov. 5 vote is quieter: one House race remains undecided, and the deciding will be done by arithmetic rather than advertising. In the state’s 2nd Congressional District, Democrat Jared Golden leads Republican challenger Austin Theriault by roughly 2,000 first-place votes out of a shade under 400,000 ballots cast, according to the first tally posted by the secretary of state’s office. Neither man cleared 49%.
That is where Maine’s unusual system takes over. The state’s voters adopted ranked choice voting in 2016, a method many places use in local races, though few states have accepted it. Under it, ballots whose first choice was neither major candidate have their next ranking folded into the count until someone holds a majority.
The 2nd District’s congressional contest is the one federal office on Maine’s 2024 general ballot run this way; president, senator and the District 1 House seat were plain plurality affairs. The rest of the Nov. 5 slate was the usual machinery of democracy: president counted by county, town and congressional district, a U.S. Senate seat, state senators and representatives, county offices from judge of probate to sheriff, and a statewide referendum election with its own tabulation and a published citizen’s guide. All duly filed; all uncontroversial, notably, except the one race still open.
The stakes are not local. The Golden-Theriault contest has played out as both parties struggle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives, and The Associated Press has yet to call the race.
The referee, meanwhile, arrives with a history. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, in office since 2021, previously led Maine’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. She drew Republican anger last winter by ruling Trump ineligible for the state’s GOP primary ballot, citing his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — a decision overturned in practice when the U.S. Supreme Court intervened and Trump appeared, and won. Bellows was later doxed and swatted, with her address posted online and a hoax emergency call dispatching officers to her home. Her office now runs the central count that will settle the district’s ranked-choice office.
The arithmetic left over is small but not nothing. One valid alternative to the top two appeared on the tally: Diana Merenda, a retiree who declared as a write-in candidate to protest the war in Gaza, collecting 400 votes. Those ballots, and any others that ranked neither Golden nor Theriault first, now move to their second choices — the whole point of the exercise.
It would seem an odd way to elect a congressman: days of waiting, spreadsheets and second preferences. Mainers, having chosen the system themselves in 2016, appear content to let it run. The rest of the country, for once, is watching a count rather than a fight over one.
Sources
- Election Results 2024 | SOS
- Maine elections chief who drew Trump's ire narrates House tabulations in livestream – Yahoo News Australia
