BELFAST, Maine — With fewer than 100 votes separating incumbent Sen. Mike Thibodeau, R-Winterport, from political newcomer Jonathan Fulford, D-Monroe, Fulford’s team announced Thursday they will ask for a recount of the ballots cast for the Waldo County state Senate seat.
“In light of the severe weather and power outages across the county and in honor of all the people who came out under these especially challenging circumstances to cast their ballots, we want to be absolutely sure that we have the fairest, most accurate count in such a close race,” the press release from Fulford stated. “With a margin of just 0.54 percent, every vote counts.”
Thibodeau, the current Senate minority leader, seems likely to be named Senate president now that the balance of power has shifted from Democrats to Republicans.
“I’m very pleased to report that the people of Waldo County have chosen to send me back to Augusta to represent them for another two-year term,” Thibodeau wrote on his Facebook page.
But on Wednesday, a day after more than 60 percent of Maine registered voters cast their ballots across the state, the Waldo County race still wasn’t settled. The nailbiter came down to the wire that afternoon in the small town of Waldo, where a few bundled-up volunteers counted ballots by hand in an unheated, unlit town office space where flashlights and Coleman lanterns shared the tables with tepid coffee and half-eaten plates of doughnuts.
Kellie Jacobs, the Waldo registrar, said that while the lanterns and flashlights provided enough light for voters to cast their ballots after dark on Tuesday, there wasn’t enough light to reliably count the ballots in the shadowy building so the counting was left to Wednesday.
“During the day, nobody even knew we didn’t have power,” she said. “By 6 p.m. the line was long, and it was very dark.”
A total of 387 people voted on Tuesday, well over half of the town’s 609 registered voters.
So the town officials locked the ballots overnight, returning the next day to count them as Fulford and poll-watchers for Thibodeau anxiously waited to learn the outcome of the close race, which earlier reports indicated Fulford could win.
“We did good, but not as good as we needed to,” Fulford said while waiting for the final packets of votes to be hand-counted.
Avery Day, a volunteer attorney with Thibodeau’s campaign, said that no one could have predicted that the campaign would come down to the town of Waldo, or that returns would be slowed by the lingering power outage.
“We didn’t know this would be the hot spot,” he said.
Neal Harkness, chairman of the Waldo County Democratic Committee, said Thursday that after the overseas and military ballots were counted, as well as the votes from Waldo, unofficial results showed that Thibodeau was 97 votes ahead of Fulford in a Senate district that historically has been a Republican stronghold.