UPDATE: This story was updated Thursday morning with new developments
The recent run of success for advocates of ranked-choice voting surged forward Wednesday, then unexpectedly stalled.
The Democratic-controlled legislature in Maine, already the only place where the system is used for congressional contests, cleared legislation that would make the state the first where ranked-choice voting is used in presidential contests.
But the lawmakers ended their regular session late Wednesday night without completing the final, procedural and almost always pro forma steps necessary to deliver the bill to Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, whose signature seems assured. As a result, the bill will remain in limbo until legislators return to Augusta, giving its Republican opponents time to mount a last-ditch effort to derail the measure .
A special session later this summer seems likely but is not guaranteed. So it's not clear whether the system will be in place in time to govern how Democratic convention delegates are allocated in March, when Maine is switching to primaries after a long run of presidential caucuses. If the bill becomes law, it would also apply to the awarding the state's four electoral votes in November.
"It represents an historic first," Rob Richie of FairVote, a prominent advocacy group for ranked-choice voting, said in anticipation of the measure's completion. "This is a tremendous victory for our democracy."
One reason the move would be so consequential is that Maine could then test the notion that RCV generally works against Republicans, a principal reason the idea is opposed by almost everyone in the GOP establishment.
To be sure, the system caused the defeat last year of a Republican congressman, Bruce Poliquin, who failed to secure an outright majority of No. 1 votes in the midterm election and then saw a lopsided share of the minor-party candidates' first-choice ballots redistributed to Democrat Jared Golden as the second choice.
But two years earlier, the reallocation of third-party votes could have had the opposite effect. Hillary Clinton carried the state with a 48 percent plurality, meaning the RCV rules would have been put in place. And her 22,000-vote margin over Donald Trump was less than the 38,100 votes won by the Libertarian nominee, Gary Johnson, who polling showed took the bulk of his support away from Trump. So there is a reasonable shot that Trump could have carried the state if voters had been allowed to list him as their second choice after Johnson.
From now on, a similar result statewide or in either of the state's two House districts would trigger this sort of instant runoff. (Maine and Nebraska are the only states where one elector goes to the winner of each congressional district.)
Final action in Maine would be the biggest win so far for RCV advocates. Last week, a panel in New York City voted to create a referendum this fall in which the city will decide whether to use the system in primaries and special elections. At least five cities will use RCV for the first time this fall in Michigan, Minnesota, Utah and New Mexico – although the city council in Albuquerque, the state's largest city, rejected this concept this week.
Maine would become the sixth state where Democrats use RCV for all or part of their caucuses or primaries. None of them used the system for picking presidential nominees four years ago.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.