Overview
- Several municipalities reported problems during the multi-day ranked-choice tabulation when they sent the wrong, missing, or unreadable thumb drives to the state, prompting officials to seek corrected materials.
- City and state investigators retrieved the correct Biddeford drive after officials discovered a drive with local results had been submitted instead of state-level results.
- Bath initially did not include a drive in the materials picked up by law enforcement and later provided the correct drive, while Bowdoinham supplied a drive that could not be read and had paper ballots transported to Augusta for rescanning.
- The Secretary of State’s Office says no drives are missing and that errors were human or technical and were corrected, but the Maine Republican Party has seized on the incidents to criticize Secretary Shenna Bellows and the ranked-choice process.
- Ranked-choice tabulation is ongoing, several races have been moved to recounts, and reporters are pressing for clearer public explanations and stronger chain-of-custody and verification safeguards to restore voter confidence.