On Election Day, Bruce Poliquin won re-election to Congress to represent the 2nd Congressional District by about 2,000 votes. In the realms of sanity and fairness, that would be the headline, but forces from outside the 2nd District conspired to work against the wishes of the voters in this district. The cycle of southern Maine liberal arrogance continues.

Southern Maine liberals have been frustrated with the conservative vote in northern Maine. The voting bloc leans right, but in the minds of the political elites, rural Maine doesn’t vote the “right” way. How do they overcome the obvious intellectual deficits of northern Maine hicks, those lovable, quaint and postcard-worthy but not vote-worthy backwoods Mainers?

Convinced of their intellectual superiority, liberals simply awarded themselves extra votes. If the Democrats couldn’t win the first time, it just wasn’t fair, so they added in the votes of their stealth Democrat candidates: the independents. Extra, do-over and everybody-gets-a-win-as-long-as they’re-not-Republican votes.

Now Democrats can say that they have not only three outside campaign dollars to every one outside Republican dollar, but also three votes per Democrat voter to every one vote per Republican.

In 2016, the voters of the 2nd District voted against ranked-choice voting by 20,000 votes, but it narrowly passed because of its support in the 1st District. So which district supports ranked-choice voting? Certainly, not the 2nd District!

But ranked-choice voting – the majority will of the voters in the 1st Congressional District – has been used to circumvent the majority will of the voters of the 2nd Congressional District, who gave Bruce Poliquin the victory to represent them in Washington.

The voters in the 2nd District voted against do-overs, twosies and threesies votes, but the 1st District has overruled rural Maine and demanded we vote and vote again until we get it “right.” In other words, voting the southern Maine way is all we have left.

Andy and Sara Torbett

Atkinson