Rank-choice voting sabotaged in Maine.

From Daily Kos:

ME-Gov: A huge mess is unfolding in Maine, after Secretary of State Matt Dunlap told legislators on Thursday that the state could not conduct its June primaries using instant-runoff voting (IRV) due to a legal issue first pointed out by the state attorney general's office. Confusingly, though, Dunlap later said his department would nevertheless proceed with implementing the new system, which was passed by voters in 2016, claiming that election officials "do not have time to do anything else."​

​The legal dispute is highly arcane but it leaves the state in a precarious position. Both Dunlap and state Attorney General Janet Mills, who is a candidate for governor, urged the legislature to correct the problem, but that's simply not going to happen, since Republicans and a number of Democrats are opposed to IRV.

That means the issue is headed to court, though it could play a role on the campaign trail, too: One of Mills' opponents in the Democratic primary, former state House Speaker Mark Eves, accused her office of trying "to veto the will of the people in a way that benefits the electoral prospects of the Attorney General."

Under Maine's traditional system of awarding nominations to the candidate who wins a plurality of the vote, Mills might indeed prosper, since she likely starts the race with the greatest name recognition. In response to Eves' charges, Mills released a memo dated last year "laying out the process" for establishing an "ethical wall" between herself and her office's elections department. It's not clear from the Portland Press-Herald's writeup, though, whether this wall was ever put in place.