That is an incredibly long and wordy article to basically say “IRV is doing what it’s supposed to do”. Some voters choosing to skip their first preference is…weird, and probably should have just meant their second preference was counted as their first, and the fact that they don’t do a full distribution of preferences all the time is strange for the sake of having the complete data, but fundamentally this isn’t really messy at all, from what I can see.
A ballot that contains 1 skipped ranking before its highest continuing ranking is interesting. I suppose that means a voter is expressing “I only want to participate in an election for an office elected by ranked-choice voting: if there aren’t 3 or more candidates I don’t want to participate”. Such a ballot is not necessarily an “Exhausted ballot”:
“Inactive ballot” means a ballot on which no active candidate is ranked, contains an overvote at the highest ranking of active candidates, or contains 2 or more sequential skipped rankings before its highest-ranked active candidate.
Each ballot shall contain instructions informing the voter of the following, […] That the voter should not give more than one candidate the same ranking, rank a candidate more than once, or skip a ranking.
That is an incredibly long and wordy article to basically say “IRV is doing what it’s supposed to do”. Some voters choosing to skip their first preference is…weird, and probably should have just meant their second preference was counted as their first, and the fact that they don’t do a full distribution of preferences all the time is strange for the sake of having the complete data, but fundamentally this isn’t really messy at all, from what I can see.
A ballot that contains 1 skipped ranking before its highest continuing ranking is interesting. I suppose that means a voter is expressing “I only want to participate in an election for an office elected by ranked-choice voting: if there aren’t 3 or more candidates I don’t want to participate”. Such a ballot is not necessarily an “Exhausted ballot”:
Note that there are more resources I found at https://www.legislature.maine.gov/lawlibrary/ranked-choice-voting-in-maine/9509
It’s interesting that the text of Washington, D.C., Initiative 83, Ranked-Choice Voting Initiative (November 2024) is similar to the Maine statutes, but specifically says that voters should be informed that they should not skip a ranking: