Former candidate: Weil gets it wrong

Gordon Weil has been making stuff up for decades, and those of us who have been victimized by it typically just let it go. But not this time.

In his Nov. 16 column “Ranked Choice Voting Must Not Encourage Spoilers,” Weil wrote that “[A] classic spoiler was Eliot Cutler in the 2014 Maine governor’s race, who reneged on his promise to drop out if he trailed.”

Wrong. Again.

First of all, I never promised to drop out if I trailed. What I did do was ask voters to wait until two weeks or so before the election and then to decide whether they thought that I could win. If they didn’t think I could win, I said that they should vote for someone else. I said that I couldn’t in good conscience support either of my opponents and therefore would not drop out. As it turned out, my support collapsed after Senator King unendorsed me, and many of my supporters did vote for other candidates, leaving me with about 8 percent of the votes.

Second, the NBC exit poll that year indicated that if I had not been on the ballot, Governor LePage’s margin of victory over Representative Michaud would have been even greater than it was. So I clearly did not “spoil” Mr. Michaud’s chances of winning. As I had suggested to him before he decided to run, he couldn’t win whether or not I was on the ballot as an independent candidate.
And finally, for the record, I have been urging Maine to adopt a ranked choice voting system for many years and was one of the leaders in the effort to get it adopted. I am proud that we have it . . . and only wish we’d had it in 2010 or 2014!

Eliot Cutler,

Cape Elizabeth

Poliquin would do well to stay away from citing the Constitution

In the recent 2nd District of Maine election Poliquin got 131,466 votes, Golden 129,556, Bond 16,500 and Hoar 6,953.  No one got a majority but Poliquin got a plurality or more votes than anyone else but not more than the sum of the other candidates.

The election rules were that if no one got a majority or in this case 142,238 votes, the winner would be determined by rank choice of whoever got the majority of second place votes. Voting first, second, third or fourth cannot be ascertained mathematically except by considering the number of times the numbers one, two, three or four show up in vertical columns where the columns are headed by the numbers and the rows the listing of all the individual votes or 284,475.

In this case the magic number is one more than half the total or 142,238.  Any combination of second, third and fourth place less than this number means the number of second place votes is not a majority of all the votes counted and any number of second place votes above this number yields the second place finisher a majority of the total votes counted when you discount the ballots in which the first place finisher did not get a vote.

This phenomenon can be demonstrated by assigning numbers to the positions in a matrix. It is easy to see how a team can win and not get a single first place finish.  It demonstrates the difference between matrix addition and ordinary addition.

Poliquin would do well to stay away from citing the Constitution because under it the politicians have created a matrix scheme to insure the President and Vice President are of the same political party and a counting method that discounts all the votes for the non-plurality winner in each state.

Fred Blanchard,

Brunswick