It turns out the battle over Maine's voting system isn't done yet.
When the Republican Party failed to turn in enough petition signatures last week to block the use of ranked-choice voting in Maine's presidential election this year, it seemed that fight was finished. But Maine, the one state that has approved RCV, is facing a new challenge.
A federal lawsuit filed this week seeks to block the use of ranked-choice voting in November, which would be another high-profile test of a system that advocates are trying to expand throughout the country. And it would play a role in the outcome of one of the most-watched Senate races in the country, featuring incumbent Republican Susan Collins.
The lawsuit — filed on behalf of four Maine voters against Gov. Janet Mills, Attorney General Aaron Frey and Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap — is the just the latest in a series of challenges to RCV in Maine, which was initially approved by voters in 2016 for use in state and congressional elections. The system allows people to vote for more than one candidate and rank their choices.
Proponents argue that it results in a truer reflection of voter support, achieves majority support before naming a winner, allows for an instant runoff that saves the time and expense of putting on another election, and makes for less harsh political campaigns.
Opponents say the system is confusing, and in this lawsuit they rely heavily on the argument that the value of some people's votes is diminished if they don't choose multiple candidates.
Maine voters again approved the idea in 2018 after the Legislature had rejected it and legislation later expanded it for use in the presidential race; an attempt to place another voter referendum on the ballot this fall — which would have halted its use in the 2020 election — failed because not enough valid signatures were gathered.
Ranked-choice voting resulted in Democrat Jared Golden ousting Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin in 2018. Poliquin initially challenged the results in court but ended up withdrawing his lawsuit.
The latest suit argues that allowing ranked-choice voting in this fall would deny many voters full participation in the election. The argument is based largely on a study of the 2018 elections by Nolan McCarty, a Princeton University professor.
The study claims many voters were hurt because they did not understand how ranked-choice voting works and did not choose and rank enough candidates.
So, the argument goes, after the first round of ballot counting if no candidate has a majority, then the candidate receiving the lowest number of votes is eliminated and the second choice of those voters is applied in the second round of counting. (That's how Golden won despite trailing in the initial count.)
But if the voter did not make a second or subsequent selection, then their ballot is "exhausted" and, in effect, does not count, the suit argues.
It points out that the judge in the 2018 legal challenge ruled there was no empirical evidence to show that the system diminished the votes of some people.
It also argues that an election conducted using a larger number of absentee ballots, as is expected this fall because of the coronavirus pandemic, could exacerbate the problem. That's because people won't have a chance to get help with their ballot if they are voting at home.
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.