Maine’s June primaries feature some of the state’s most tantalizing nominating races in years, with ranked-choice voting adding complexity to what could be a long count.
Here’s what to know about how results will come in.
When will results start coming in?
Polls close at 8 p.m. Tuesday. The Bangor Daily News will begin posting results then — keep an eye on our election results page. We have revamped our results pages to include live updates and easily accessible town-by-town grids to help you track the action easier. The BDN reports races down to the local level across the state and is tracking more than 600 elections Tuesday.
How are results gathered on election night?
The BDN and the Associated Press are the only media outlets in Maine that independently collect statewide results from city and town clerks. Because of that, our results will often look different than those of other Maine outlets as we add cities and towns to our systems at different times.
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What is ranked-choice voting?
Ranked-choice voting, which Maine voters passed in a 2016 referendum, allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. It applies to this year’s primaries for governor, U.S. Senate, the 2nd Congressional District and several legislative races.
A candidate wins outright if they receive more than 50% of first-choice votes. If no one clears that threshold, the last-place finisher is eliminated and their voters’ second choices are redistributed to the remaining candidates. The process repeats until someone wins a majority.
How does this affect the count?
We don’t get all of the ranked-choice results on election night. Clerks only report the first choices of voters. If no candidate wins a majority in any race with three or more people in it, the secretary of state’s office will confirm the winner in a central count in Augusta next week after collecting ballot information from cities and towns.
Several of Tuesday’s races are likely to go that route. The Democratic gubernatorial primary features at least three candidates tightly bunched in polls, and the Republican side has a frontrunner in lawyer Bobby Charles with a still-unsettled field behind him. The Democratic 2nd Congressional District primary is also competitive.
When will winners be projected?
The AP and other organizations — including the BDN’s partner, Decision Desk HQ — use results to project winners before the unofficial count is complete. Those outlets employ statisticians who consider a range of factors before making a projection when they are nearly certain a result will not change. BDN editors sign off before projections are made public.
We have only called a race going into a ranked-choice count once — in the 2024 race in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. At that point, we were confident that U.S. Rep. Jared Golden had enough support in a race that was only going that count due to blank ballots.