It will be a long and difficult road back to the lofty ideal of Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address, in which he said, in part, “--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Yesterday, October 16, 2017, the Maine State Government, Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee held a hearing for and against Rep. Kent Ackley's bill, HR 1646, which is an Act to Bring Maine's Ranked Choice Voting Law into Constitutional Compliance. This bill will suspend the use of Ranked Choice Voting in general elections for governor and state legislative offices until the Maine Constitution is amended, but authorize it for use in 2018 and beyond for all other statewide elections (including all Maine primaries and for federal legislative offices).
Ranking choice is already being implemented or has been implemented in cities, and states around the country, but is at the same time under attack by legislature members of both major parties, Democratic and Republican. In Maine, the legislature, likewise is delaying and obstructing the enactment of this people’s initiative law, Ranked Choice Voting.
Choice voting is choosing candidates by ranking them according to preference. Under the previous law, money power and the two major political Parties effectively selected candidates in political primary elections for which voters were then allowed to vote during the general election. This process has firmly established a duopoly government in which only two political Parties are able to, alternately, govern the majority.
Candidates, both Republican and Democrat now win elections with much less than a majority of the vote. For example governors are elected to office with less than 40% of the total vote, meaning a minority of the voters decide which of their candidates shall be governor. Neither of the two major Parties wants to lose the power to select for us, their representatives to be our government.
Two speakers at the hearing in Augusta yesterday, were from North Carolina. Their testimony was about how choice voting enactment was achieved, how little cost was involved, relatively speaking, and how well received the process had been by the voters. The enactment had been initiated by the legislature, but in the next election cycle the Republican Party gained control of state government and overturned the choice system for voting.
Choice in voting is intended to bring about a return to representative government, of, by and for all the people. The majority has slowly begun to understand that a small minority, now the Republican Party, has gathered the money power to control all government, both federal and state, in our country. Republican voters comprise a small percentage of all voters (28%), yet Republicans now control the US Congress, hold the Presidency, are a majority in the Supreme Court, hold a majority (64%) of Governorships around the country and are majority (70%) in state legislatures.
Many in the majority are awakening to the fact that it will be an almost impossible task now to return to a government of, by and for the majority in this country. Money power of the Republican Party can and has blocked all efforts to regain a government elected by the majority. And it is happening right here in Maine. The Maine legislature is blocking the enactment of Ranked Choice Voting.