America today is no longer a two-party nation. More and more, we find third- and fourth-party candidates on election ballots at every level.

The result is that the “winning” candidate often gets only a plurality of the vote — meaning that most of the voters didn’t want that person to win.

Ranked-choice voting is a proven, easy-to-understand solution for making every vote count and ensuring majority winners. It’s been used successfully in Maine – and for more than a century, without controversy, in other parts of the world, by millions of intelligent people just like us.

In Augusta today, the Legislature is considering LD 1083, a bill that would extend ranked-choice voting to the state’s presidential elections.

This is a great idea. For 200 years, America has been moving toward ever-greater fairness in elections – giving the vote to African-Americans and to women, switching to popular election of senators, establishing the one-person-one-vote principle, and more.

Using ranked-choice voting in Maine as a fairer, more democratic way of electing a president is simply the logical, realistic, and proper continuation of our tradition and history.

George Simonson
Harpswell