Mainers will vote Tuesday on eight statewide referendums and decide on various local issues from high-profile mayoral races to school bonds.
Find your polling place.
Polls open between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., depending on a municipality’s population. All polls close at 8 p.m. You can find your polling place here.
You can register to vote at the polls.
Maine is one of more than 20 states with same-day registration, meaning you can bring identification and proof of residency to your polling place in order to register to vote. The state has an online tool to check your registration status if you don’t know it.
You still have time to drop off your absentee ballot.
All absentee ballots are counted as long as they are returned to city or town clerks by 8 p.m. Tuesday. Maine does not require voters to give a reason for voting absentee.
If you recently mailed your ballot, check the state’s lookup tool to ensure the local clerk received it. If your absentee ballot was not received, you can vote in person and your absentee ballot will be voided.
Research the candidates and issues.
Read our voter’s guide to learn about the referendums and the array of candidates in mayoral, council, school board and other local elections.
Maine media outlets collect results from municipalities and project outcomes.
All election results reported Tuesday night will be unofficial. Media outlets get these unofficial results directly from cities and towns, which have two days to send final results to the secretary of state’s office for certification. Only at that point are results official.
In Maine, the BDN and the Associated Press are the only media outlets that gather statewide results from clerks independently. Because of that, our results will often look different than those of other Maine news outlets as we put cities and towns into our systems at different times. The BDN reports races down to the local level across the state.
The AP and other organizations — including the BDN’s partner, Decision Desk HQ — often use those results to project a winner before the unofficial count is complete. To do this, they employ statisticians who consider a range of factors — including the size of a candidate’s lead and the partisan leanings of towns yet to report — before making a final projection. BDN editors give approval before our projections are made public.
Follow the election results.
We will start posting election results after polls close at 8 p.m. Follow our election results page and the main website for coverage. You can also sign up for Pocket Politics, our texting service run by Michael Shepherd, the politics editor. He’ll share insights there first.