Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin has lost his seat to Democratic challenger Jared Golden through ranked-choice voting for Maine’s 2nd District House race, Maine’s Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said Thursday.
“It looks like Jared Golden is the apparent winner of the ranked-choice election,” Dunlap said, noting that Golden received 50.5 percent of the votes and Poliquin won 49.5 percent.
Just hours before Dunlap’s announcement, a judge had rejected Poliquin’s request for a temporary restraining order to halt the ranked-choice voting process and claimed ranked-choice voting is unconstitutional.
The ranked-choice voting process for Maine was approved in a 2016 referendum and requires voters to list candidates in order of preference. Although Poliquin was up by approximately 2,000 votes after ballots were first counted, he failed to receive a majority of the votes.
This prompted a second tabulation process so that votes for independent candidates would then be counted toward the voters’ backup choices.
Poliquin has not conceded and claims that he will proceed with his lawsuit asserting ranked-choice voting violates the
Constitution.
“It is now officially clear I won the constitutional ‘one-person, one-vote’ first choice election on Election Day that has been used in Maine for more than one hundred years. We will proceed with our constitutional concerns about the rank vote algorithm,” Poliquin said in a statement.
Golden’s victory means that Democrats have earned a net gain of 35 House seats. Seven more races have yet to be called.
