Case Study 19.2: Maine and Alaska as RCV Laboratories

Two States, One Question

Two states have moved farther toward Ranked-Choice Voting in federal elections than any other in the United States: Maine, which adopted RCV for federal congressional and presidential races by 2018 (after a 2016 referendum and constitutional litigation), and Alaska, which adopted a top-four primary plus RCV general for state and federal races in 2020 (used in elections from 2022 onward). Both states have produced specific election outcomes that have been actively contested by Republican losers and defended by RCV proponents. Both episodes are instructive — not because they settle the RCV question (they do not) but because they show what the actual operation of RCV in U.S. elections looks like.

This case study walks through both episodes, presenting the criticisms and defenses on each, then steps back to assess what the limited empirical record actually supports.

Maine: The 2018 ME-2 Election

Maine adopted RCV for federal races through a 2016 referendum. The implementation faced constitutional challenges from the Maine state legislature (which sued over the application of RCV to state races, where the state constitution required plurality winners). The compromise that emerged: RCV would be used for federal races (where Congress has plenary authority over election rules) but not for state-level races governed by the state constitution. RCV's first major federal-race application was the 2018 election for Maine's Second Congressional District.

The candidates were the Republican incumbent, Bruce Poliquin, and Democratic challenger, Jared Golden. Two independent candidates, Tiffany Bond and Will Hoar, also appeared on the ballot.

In the first-round count, Poliquin received 46.3% of votes, Golden received 45.6%, Bond received 5.7%, and Hoar received 2.4%. No candidate had a majority. Under traditional first-past-the-post rules, Poliquin would have won — he had the plurality. Under Maine's RCV rules, the bottom two candidates were eliminated and their voters' second-place choices were redistributed.

When the second-round count was completed, Golden had pulled ahead of Poliquin and won by 3,509 votes (50.6% to 49.4%) after the redistributions. Independent voters who had ranked Bond or Hoar first had, on net, ranked Golden second more often than Poliquin. The eventual winner had majority support across the full preference rankings of the electorate.

Poliquin's response: he sued, arguing that the RCV system violated the U.S. Constitution. The federal district court rejected the suit, holding that single-member-district RCV is constitutional. The First Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court denied cert.

The Critique

Poliquin's critique of RCV in Maine, presented in its strongest form, has several components.

First, the plurality argument: Poliquin received more first-place votes than any other candidate. Under any standard plurality rule (which is what most U.S. elections use), he would have won. RCV reversed an outcome that traditional voting would have given him. Critics argue this demonstrates RCV's disagreement with majority-rule intuitions: most Maine voters expressed Poliquin as their first choice, and the RCV mechanism overrode that expression.

Second, the complexity argument: a substantial fraction of ME-2 voters did not rank candidates beyond their first choice. Their ballots were "exhausted" before the final round, meaning they did not contribute to the redistribution that decided the election. Critics argue this was disproportionately a problem among voters with less formal education, less English-language fluency, or less familiarity with the new system. RCV, in this view, effectively disenfranchised voters who voted under the traditional rules they were familiar with.

Third, the legitimacy argument: an outcome that does not match what most voters' first preferences would suggest is hard for those voters to accept as legitimate. Maine's RCV system produced a result that 46% of voters had explicitly ranked second-best (or worse). In a low-trust environment, this kind of outcome erodes public confidence in elections.

The Defense

The defense of RCV in the Maine case, presented in its strongest form, also has several components.

First, the consensus argument: Golden won because he had broader support across the full preference rankings of the electorate, including support from independent voters whose first preferences could not win. This is what RCV is designed to capture. A democratic system that can identify the candidate with the broadest support, rather than just the largest plurality, produces winners with stronger democratic mandates.

Second, the strategic-voting argument: under traditional plurality rules, the independent voters who ranked Bond or Hoar first might have abandoned those candidates to vote strategically for one of the two major-party candidates. RCV freed them to vote sincerely. The first-round vote shares are not what voters would have produced under FPTP; they are what voters actually preferred when given the option to express preferences without strategic-voting penalty.

Third, the Condorcet defense: while Poliquin won the first-round count, exit-poll and post-election analysis suggested that Golden was the Condorcet winner — the candidate who would have beaten Poliquin in a head-to-head race after factoring in the preferences of Bond and Hoar voters. RCV identified the candidate the electorate, on net, preferred. Plurality rules would have elected the candidate the electorate, on net, preferred less.

Alaska: The 2022 At-Large Special Election

Alaska adopted a more elaborate reform than Maine: a top-four open primary (any candidate from any party can file; the top four finishers regardless of party advance to the general) plus RCV in the general election. The system was approved by Alaska voters in 2020 and used for the first time in the 2022 special election to fill the U.S. House at-large seat vacated by the death of Republican Representative Don Young in March 2022.

The general-election candidates after the top-four primary were Sarah Palin (Republican, the former governor and 2008 vice-presidential nominee), Nick Begich III (Republican, member of the prominent Begich political family in Alaska), and Mary Peltola (Democrat, a former state legislator and Alaska Native). One Republican-leaning candidate had advanced from the primary but withdrew before the general election.

In the first-round RCV count, Palin received 31.3% of votes, Peltola received 40.2%, and Begich received 28.5%. No candidate had a majority. Under RCV elimination rules, Begich (the lowest finisher) was eliminated and his voters' second-place rankings were redistributed.

The redistribution showed something significant: Begich voters' second preferences split roughly 50/29/21 — meaning that 50% of Begich voters ranked Palin second, 29% ranked Peltola second, and 21% did not rank a second choice (their ballots were exhausted). After the redistribution, Peltola had 51.5% and Palin had 48.5%. Peltola won.

Palin's response: she publicly criticized the result, arguing that "ranked-choice voting was bizarre, convoluted, confusing." She filed no formal legal challenge. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), Senator Tom Tillis (R-NC), and several conservative writers nationally argued the result demonstrated that RCV was unfair to Republican candidates.

A related controversy arose in the 2022 regular general election. The same three-candidate race repeated (Palin, Begich, Peltola), and Peltola won again under similar dynamics. Peltola subsequently lost her seat in the 2024 cycle to a Republican (Nick Begich III) under continued RCV rules — a fact that complicates the simple narrative that RCV systematically disadvantages Republicans.

The Critique

The Alaska critique, in its strongest form, holds that the 2022 result represented a structural failure of RCV. The argument:

First, combined-Republican-vote: Palin (31.3%) and Begich (28.5%) together received 59.8% of first-place votes. The two Republican candidates collectively had a clear majority. A different system — a Republican primary that had selected one of them, with a single Republican-versus-Democrat general election — would have likely produced a Republican win. RCV's structure meant the Republican vote was split across two candidates whose voters did not consolidate efficiently in the elimination round. From this view, RCV punishes parties that are internally divided in ways that traditional partisan-primary structures would not.

Second, exhausted-ballot disenfranchisement: 21% of Begich voters did not rank a second choice. Their ballots were "exhausted" in the final round and did not contribute to the outcome. Critics argue this was disproportionately a function of voter unfamiliarity with the new system; voters who would have voted Republican under any plurality rule were effectively prevented from contributing to the final result.

Third, the moderate-Republican exit: The Begich voters who did rank a second choice split 50/29 for Palin over Peltola. But the 21% who exhausted their ballots may have been disproportionately moderate Republicans who could not bring themselves to rank either Palin (whom they regarded as too populist) or Peltola (whom they regarded as too liberal). This kind of voter, in a normal partisan-primary system, would have voted reluctantly for the Republican nominee in the general election. RCV gave them an option (rank no one) that effectively withdrew their voice.

The Defense

The defense, in its strongest form, holds that the 2022 result was exactly what RCV is supposed to produce.

First, Peltola was the Condorcet winner: post-election analysis using ranked-preference data suggested Peltola was the candidate that the most Alaskans preferred when paired against any other candidate head-to-head. Palin's high disapproval ratings made her unable to assemble majority support across rankings, even though her first-place support was strong. Under any traditional system that asks "which candidate does the electorate, on net, prefer?", Peltola wins. RCV simply revealed that preference; FPTP would have elected the candidate the electorate on net preferred less.

Second, the combined-vote argument is wrong: it treats the two Republican candidates' first-place votes as transferable to each other, but the data shows that 21% of Begich voters did not transfer to Palin. They had their reasons. Saying the Republican vote was "split" treats the voter coalitions as fungible; the data shows they were not.

Third, RCV did its job: in a closed Republican primary, Palin (with her strong populist base) might well have defeated Begich. The general election would then have been Palin versus Peltola — and Peltola would likely have won that two-way race anyway, given the Begich-voter preference data. RCV produced the same outcome as a separate primary plus general would have, but with less primary cost and with a cleaner expression of what voters actually wanted.

Fourth, the 2024 Begich win: in 2024, Nick Begich III won the at-large seat under the same RCV system that had produced Peltola's 2022 victory. The structural argument that "RCV systematically disadvantages Republicans" is empirically falsified by the 2024 result. The system produces the candidate the electorate prefers; in 2022, that was Peltola, and in 2024, that was Begich. Each result reflects the underlying preferences, not a systematic bias.

What These Cases Show

Three things are clear from the Maine and Alaska experience.

First, RCV does not produce uniform outcomes for any party. It elected a Democrat in Maine 2018 (Golden) and a Democrat in Alaska 2022 (Peltola), but it also elected Republicans in Alaska 2024 (Begich) and in various municipal elections nationally. The claim that RCV systematically disadvantages one party is not supported by the evidence so far.

Second, RCV does produce outcomes that depart from pure plurality counts. In both Maine and Alaska, the candidate with the most first-place votes lost. This is the system working as designed — it elects the candidate with the broadest preference support — but it is also genuinely difficult for losing voters whose first-choice candidate had the most first-place support to accept.

Third, the legitimacy challenge is real. Voters in jurisdictions that have adopted RCV report higher rates of confusion than in jurisdictions that use FPTP. A non-trivial share of voters in RCV elections do not rank beyond their first choice. Whether this represents real disenfranchisement (as critics argue) or simply voter preference (as defenders argue) is genuinely contested. The empirical evidence on voter satisfaction with RCV is mixed: some studies find higher satisfaction (Maine voters polled have generally supported continuing RCV); others find that confusion and exhausted ballots are persistent problems.

The Maine and Alaska cases together illustrate both the promise and the cost of RCV. They do not settle the question; they sharpen it. Whether RCV is the right reform for the U.S. system depends on which costs and which benefits one weights more heavily, and on whether the legitimacy challenge can be addressed through better voter education or whether it is structural.

Reading and Sources

For the Maine case, see the Maine Secretary of State's RCV election results database, the First Circuit's decision in Baber v. Dunlap (2018), and the FairVote analysis of Maine's RCV implementation. For the Alaska case, see the Alaska Division of Elections' RCV results, the academic analysis published in Election Law Journal on the 2022 special, and the various commentary by Alaska political scientists. For comparative empirical analysis of RCV in U.S. jurisdictions, see Lee Drutman, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop (Oxford, 2020), and Jack Santucci, More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America (Oxford, 2022). For the strongest critique of RCV, see Edward B. Foley, "Single-Choice Plus: A Better Voting System Than Ranked-Choice for the U.S.," Harvard Journal on Legislation (2023).