Peter Brann Pens Chapter on Ranked–Choice Voting for American Bar Association Book

Partner Peter J. Brann has authored a chapter on “Ranked–Choice Voting: Maine’s Experience” in America Votes! Challenges to Modern Election Law and Voting Rights (American Bar Association, 4th edition, edited by Benjamin E. Griffith and John Hardin Young). In the chapter, Brann discusses the nature and history of ranked–choice voting as an alternative method of conducting elections, and then addresses specifically Maine’s recent experience with ranked–choice voting in a federal Congressional election. That experience was personal for Brann, who, along with B&I attorneys, Michael Carey and Eamonn Hart, represented Rep. Jared Golden (ME–2), in defeating a lawsuit filed to undo the results of the ranked choice vote in Maine’s second congressional district after the 2018 election. Brann walks through how ranked–choice voting worked just as it was designed in the 2018 election, and survived all of the legal challenges put up against it. In this regard, then, Maine may be a harbinger of what’s to come in other states and jursidictions.