In Maine’s first brush with ranked-choice voting, Attorney General Janet Mills emerged the winner of the Democratic primary in the race to succeed Gov. Paul LePage.

Mills had led the seven-candidate field from the start, but initially won only 33% of the vote.  Attorney Adam Cote trailed by only 6,160 votes as the tabulation started, with Elizabeth “Betsy” Sweet, a consultant and social activist, in third place.

Under ranked-choice voting – also called “instant runoff”— voters rank all the candidates, rather than voting for just one.  Candidates who win the fewest first-choice votes are progressively removed, and their voters’ second and subsequent choices are re-awarded to the other candidates.  This process continues until one of the remaining candidates emerges with a majority of the votes.

Today the outcome was still uncertain even after redistribution of the votes for the four candidates who finished last.  But 58% of Sweet’s voters named Mills as their next-best choice, so reassigning her votes pushed Mills over the top, with 54% of the total votes cast.

No ranked-choice tabulation was needed in the Republican primary, since Republican businessman Shawn Moody had won his party’s gubernatorial nomination outright.  In November, Mills will face Moody and two well-known independents, State Treasurer Terry Hayes and Alan Caron, a businessman and long-time newspaper columnist.

Ranked-choice voting was also used today to determine the Democratic nominee in Maine’s 2^nd Congressional District, but there the outcome was never really in doubt.  State Representative Jared Golden emerged from the June 12 primary with nearly 50% of the vote, and after votes for the third-place candidate were redistributed he remained ahead in the lead.  In November Golden will try to unseat Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, who faced no opponent in the primary.

Maine this month became the first state ever to use ranked-choice voting in a statewide election, after voters authorized it in a 2016 statewide ballot question.  The state’s Supreme Judicial Court subsequently ruled that the state constitution needs to be amended before ranked choice can be employed in general elections for state offices, including legislative contests.  That ruling will not prevent its use in November’s congressional contests, however, nor did it stop its use in party primaries.

The four-way gubernatorial contest in November, however, will be decided the old-fashioned way:  whoever wins the most votes on Election Day will become Maine’s next governor.