This story appears as part of a collaboration to strengthen investigative journalism in Maine between the BDN and The Maine Monitor. Read more about the partnership.
Shortly after the polls closed on election night, the town clerk of Cranberry Isles, Ben Sumner, and two volunteers, Barbara Meyers and Beverly Sanborn, began counting the island’s ballots by hand.
With a view of Acadia National Park, Great Cranberry is the largest of five islands that make up the town of Cranberry Isles, which has a population of about 160. On Wednesday, there were 48 ballots to count — the old-fashioned way, with no electronic tabulators in sight.
Cranberry Isles is one of 88 towns in Maine that still counts its ballots by hand. That is down from 161 towns, or about a third of the state’s voting jurisdictions, that did so in 2024, according to data from Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization that researches the use of technology in elections. Those towns were quite small — with an average of 248 registered voters — making up 4% of the total voters in the state.
This election cycle, 73 of them decided to join the majority of Maine’s municipalities and switch to hand-fed optical scanners, which scan hand-marked paper ballots and tabulate the votes, storing the data on a memory stick.
These scanners are manufactured by a company called Election Systems and Software, which Maine has contracted with since 2012, and provided by the state at no cost to municipalities. Studies have shown these machines are more accurate and more efficient than hand counting, which can be prone to human error.
“More towns opted into tabulators because counting by hand is incredibly time consuming and more subject to human error,” Jana Spaulding, the deputy secretary of state for communications, told The Maine Monitor this week. “Time and time again, towns that make the switch express relief at how easy the tabulators make it to count the votes quickly.”
But it is up to towns whether they want these machines, and, on Great Cranberry, hand counting is still the method of choice.
As a fire crackled in the community center’s brick fireplace, the mantle covered in gourds and dried flowers, another year-round resident, Helen Bertles, dropped by with a homemade cake.
“Sugar, sugar, sugar. Gotta keep moving!” Bertles said before taking a seat to watch.
The clerk began the process by voiding all the town’s unused ballots. They were marked with red X’s and stored to be transported in the town offices on Islesford, a neighboring island and separate voting precinct in the Cranberry Isles.
“On Wednesday morning,” Sumner said, “I combine both precincts and report the results. If a race has to be determined by ranked choice, I’ll take the ballots off to Mount Desert on Thursday so the state police can pick them up and take them to Augusta.”
Next, the election workers opened the absentee ballots and deposited them into the town’s wooden ballot box — which is believed to be at least 100 years old — where they joined the ballots that were cast throughout Election Day.
The box was unlocked, and the group retrieved and organized the ballots. Then it was time to count.
The counting process requires one reader, who examines each ballot and announces the votes, and two counters, who keep a tally as the votes are read aloud. Sanborn, the reader this year, announced each vote, calling out, “senator, Collins,” or “governor, Pingree” as she went. The two counters, Sumner and Meyers, independently tallied the votes. Each time a candidate passed a multiple of five, they said “five” aloud in unison.
At one point, Sanborn encountered a ballot where the voter had marked Collins as their first choice, second choice and third choice, and had done the same for Jackson. Sumner reviewed the guidelines for processing such a ballot and determined it had to be counted as a blank.
As they reached the last ballot, Sanborn laughed.
“You’re going to love this, Ben. You’re a write-in,” Sanborn said.
(The vote would not count, as only votes for declared write-ins are valid.)
After all the ballots were counted, Sumner and Meyers compared their counts to verify that they matched. Then they moved on to counting the referendum votes in the same fashion.
Once those were tallied, cross checked and validated, the ballots were sealed in a lockbox with a tamper-proof lock.
Even with just 48 votes, the counting, sorting, certifying and securing of the ballots stretched to 10 p.m., concluding a 12-hour shift and another typical, if old-fashioned, election for the voters of Great Cranberry Island.