Anna Kellar is national organizing director for Rank the Vote, former executive director of the League of Women Voters of Maine and a Falmouth resident. John Palmer is a democracy reform advocate and a Maine summer resident.

In 1879, Maine’s democracy briefly broke down. That year, voters fell short of giving any candidate for governor a majority. The Legislature deadlocked. Tensions rose. Armed militias gathered. And, in the end, the state turned to one man to hold the system together: Joshua Chamberlain — Civil War hero, four-term former governor and reluctant referee of a constitutional crisis.

Chamberlain kept the peace and led the state through the impasse. Maine moved on.

Maine’s framers understood that a majority outcome mattered. When the state’s constitution was ratified in 1820, it required governors to win a majority of the popular vote. If no one did, the Legislature would step in — but as a last resort. Majority rule was the point.

After the chaos of 1879, Maine retreated from that principle. In 1880, the Constitution was amended to allow governors to win with mere pluralities. Stability was restored. But something important was lost. The amendment allowed outcomes the founders had sought to avoid.

Fast-forward to modern Maine, and the cost of that change is obvious. Since the 1970s, the state has elected governors five times with less than 40% of the vote. In those races, more than 60% of voters chose someone else. It became a recurring legitimacy problem. And Mainers noticed.

In 2016, they did something about it. By a clear statewide vote, Mainers approved ranked choice voting. The logic was simple: let voters express their real preferences, eliminate the spoiler effect and ensure winners earn majority support. In other words, restore — using modern tools — the same principle Maine’s constitutional framers had insisted on two centuries earlier.

What followed was messy. The Legislature repealed the law in a late-night session. Voters overturned that repeal through a rare people’s veto. Courts weighed in. Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court issued an advisory opinion suggesting that ranked choice voting conflicted with the state’s 1880 constitutional amendment for general elections for governor and the Legislature.

So today, Maine uses ranked choice voting in primaries for state offices, and in both primaries and general elections for Congress, for president (under a separate statute) and for many municipal offices in Portland and Westbrook. It works well and voters understand it. But it is not yet in place for the office where the original problem was most obvious.

That’s the unfinished business.

The timing could not be more relevant. In 2026, Maine will elect a new governor. Candidate fields are already crowded. And longtime state Sen. Rick Bennett — formerly Maine Senate president — has left the GOP and is running as an independent (other lesser-known independent candidates are also in the race).

That matters. As a very well-known state leader, Bennett could make this a three-way race. Maine has seen this movie before. Three-way races are how you get governors with 39% of the vote. They are how Mainers end up represented by someone most voters did not choose. They are how legitimacy erodes.

Maine’s constitutional framers knew that a majority election outcome was in the public interest way back in 1820. Almost 200 years later, Mainers said so again — twice. RCV is for the common good. At some level, the lawmakers in Augusta know it, too.

Finishing the implementation of ranked choice voting is easy. The law is already on the books. The method already works smoothly in Maine’s primaries and congressional elections. And courts elsewhere, most notably Alaska’s Supreme Court, have clarified that ranked-choice voting is a single election with a single decisive count — not a series of separate contests, as Maine’s high court suggested in its advisory opinion.

All that’s required is political will. Maine’s high court can revisit its advisory opinion, or the Legislature and governor can together act on LD 1666 — a narrowly tailored RCV bill that has already passed both chambers.

There are clear paths to completing the ranked choice voting system Maine voters want. Independents, Republicans and Democrats have all won in Maine under ranked-choice voting. What changes is not who can win, but how they win: with broader appeal, stronger mandates, and more choices on the ballot.

Mainers in 2016 voted to restore what Maine’s founders had originally put in place. Great minds really do think alike. And that brings us back to Joshua Chamberlain. In 1879, Chamberlain stood between democracy and disorder because Maine lacked a clean way to translate voter preferences into a majority outcome. If ranked choice voting had existed then, there would have been no impasse. No armed standoff. No last-minute heroics. Just ballots doing their job.

In 2026, Maine has a chance to do what would make its founders and Chamberlain proud. All it has to do is finish what it already started.