It was 46% for the Republican incumbent, Bruce Poliquin, and 46% for the challenger, state representative (Maine House) Jared Golden on election night. Bruce Poliquin received 2,000 more votes on election night, but fell short of the 50.1% threshold necessary to avoid a second round.
The two minor candidates, Tiffany Bond and William Hoar together received 8% of the vote, combined.
A substantial number of Tiffany Bond’s voters picked democrat Jared Golden as their second choice, giving Jared Golden 50.3% in the second round.
“It is hard to argue that the choice of the majority is invalid...”
The choice of the majority on election night was the GOP incumbent Bruce Poliquin. Hence the legal fight launched by Congressman Poliquin.
The outcome of the litigation will determine whether Bruce Poliquin retains his seat in Congress or whether Jared Golden becomes the congressman-elect.
Wrong word. The choice of the “majority” on election night was someone other than the republican, hence he had a minority of the vote.
He was the plurality choice, not the majority choice.
Now, many elections accept that. But some places have decided that they want a candidate who is acceptable to a majority. And the purpose of instant run-off is to find out who the voters would choose if they didn’t have their own candidate to vote for.
We tend to like month-later elections, because it eliminates the ploy of running other candidates just to entice non-voters to come to the polls, where we then hope they will pick our candidates as their second choice.
But there is no great principle that, in a multi-candidate race, the person who manages to get more votes than everybody else has to be the winner (note that legally, in Maine, it MIGHT be that the constitution requires it, but that isn’t a principle, just law).
A lot of conventions run a similar plan, you have multiple nominees, but after each round of voting you eliminate the lowest vote-getter and vote again, until someone gets a majority.
Note that both National committees do that for their presidential elections, if no presidential candidate shows up with a majority of pledged votes, they keep voting until someone gets that majority.
The problem in Maine is that the republicans didn’t put any other candidates on the ballot, while the democrats had 2 other candidates that would pull people on their side.
If the republicans had recruited a good conservative libertarian as a second candidate, they probably would have won this race.