There is no more doubt: Ranked-choice voting will be used for the first time in a presidential election this year.
Voters in Maine will be allowed to list their candidates in order of preference, and its four electoral votes will only be awarded to those who get a majority's support, under a decision Tuesday from the state Supreme Court.
The ruling is a huge symbolic victory for advocates of ranked elections, who view them as a magic formula for improving democracy by reducing the major parties' influence, encouraging more consensus-building campaigns, promoting the prospects of outsiders — and guaranteeing winners can claim a mandate because they have been endorsed by most voters.
The justices unanimously rejected the state Republican Party's efforts to force a referendum in November on the future of so-called RCV in the state, the first to use the system in contests for many state offices and Congress. Under Maine's rules for a "people's veto," getting that measure on the 2020 ballot would have automatically prevented RCV's application in the contest among President Trump, former Vice President Joe Biden and three minor-party candidates.
Now, voters will be allowed to rank all of them. If no one is the top choice on most ballots, the candidate with the fewest No. 1 votes will be dropped and their votes will be redistributed to the No. 2 choices — that process continuing in a series of computer-driven runoffs until one of them (presumably Trump or Biden) has garnered majority backing.
Maine already does things differently. It's one of two states, with Nebraska, that awards two electoral votes to the statewide winner and one vote to the person who prevails in each House district.
Trump narrowly carried the rural 2nd District in 2016, but at first blush his chances of repeating that look to go down because of the use of RCV. Two years ago, the Republican holding that congressional seat secured the most first place votes but was defeated after the instant runoff system redistributed most of the ballots of the lesser candidates to Democrat Jared Golden.
Critics say the system is needlessly complex and can disenfranchise voters who don't understand it.
Maine's high court concluded the GOP had not gathered enough valid signatures on its ballot petitions, siding with Democratic Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, who had tossed out several thousand of the 67,00 names submitted this summer.
Acting two weeks after ballots with RCV for president started rolling off the presses, the justices reversed a lower court, which said the Republicans had met their burdenwith 22 signatures to spare. The issue in the case was a narrow one — whether two of the petition circulators were required to be registered voters in the town where they were doing their canvassing. The high court said yes.
"This is a powerful moment for ranked-choice voting supporters," Rob Richie of FairVote, one of the most prominent RCV advocacy groups, exalted after the court decision. "America was founded on the promise that your vote matters. We haven't always lived up to that promise, but over time, our nation's citizens strived to ensure that every vote counts."
The ruling puts Maine on course to rely on rankings in its presidential primaries starting in 2024. This year the Democrats used RCV in five presidential primaries and caucuses.
The number of cities using ranked-choice voting has more than doubled in the past decade and will be used to choose the mayor of New York next year. Voters in Alaska and Massachusetts will decide in November whether their states will also use RCV almost exclusively in the future.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.