Maine Republican Drops Challenge to State's New Vote System, Conceding House Race

His decision means that Poliquin, a two-term incumbent, was the first choice of the most voters on Election Day in Maine’s heavily rural 2nd Congressional District but loses his race in the first federal general election decided by ranked-choice voting.

Under the system, voters can rank the candidates instead of just picking one. If no candidate gets a majority of the first-choice votes, the candidate who came in last is eliminated and those votes are redistributed to voters’ second-choice candidates. The process keeps going until someone has a majority.

In Poliquin’s race, there were two independent candidates, in addition to Poliquin and Golden. Although Poliquin led on Election Day, he did not receive a majority. When the two independent candidates were eliminated and their votes redistributed, Golden won by roughly 3,500 votes out of more than 280,000 originally cast.

A week after the election, even before all the ballots had been counted, Poliquin sued Maine’s secretary of state, seeking to stop the vote count and challenging the constitutionality of Maine’s system, which voters approved in ballot measures in 2016 and 2018.

After Golden was declared the winner based on unofficial results, Poliquin amended his lawsuit to demand either that the election be decided based only on the first-choice votes, or that the results be tossed out and the election held again. Poliquin was joined in the lawsuit by three other voters from the 2nd District.

Dec. 13, a federal judge rejected Poliquin’s arguments, saying that he failed to see how the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights were violated by the ranked-choice system and that, Maine voters having approved the system, he was not empowered “to second guess the considered judgment of the polity on the basis of the tautological observation that RCV may suffer from problems, as all voting systems do.”

It had been unclear whether Poliquin would appeal the judge’s decision until Monday, when he said on Twitter that he was throwing in the towel.

Poliquin wrote that he had been contacted by hundreds of Maine voters who expressed “grave concerns” about the ranked-choice system, which he described as a “black box computer algorithm.” But he added that he had concluded that “it’s in the best interest of my constituents and all Maine citizens to close this confusing and unfair chapter of voting history by ending any further legal proceedings.”

“Although we may disagree on the issues, I wish Jared Golden personally the best during the coming term,” he wrote.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.