PORTLAND, Maine (AP) A Maine Supreme Court decision means ranked choice voting will be used for the first time in a presidential race anywhere in the United States.

Justices concluded that the Maine Republican Party failed to reach the threshold of signatures needed for a “People’s Veto” referendum aimed at rejecting a state law expanding ranked voting to the presidential election.

The GOP collected tens of thousands of signatures but came up shy of the needed level of 67,067 after some of them were invalidated.

The fast-paced, 11th-hour legal machinations followed the secretary of state’s original decision to reject the referendum.