FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
Contact: Kristen Schulze Muszynski
o: 626-8404/ c: 441-7638

Tabulation of ranked-choice primary races scheduled at 6 p.m. today

AUGUSTA – Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, Maine’s top election official, has confirmed that all election results from the June 12, 2018 Primary Election are now uploaded and the certification process is complete. The Elections staff will now proceed to run the tabulations in the ranked-choice voting primary races.

The tabulation is scheduled for 6 p.m. today, Wednesday, June 20 at the centralized tabulation site in the Elkins Building (on the former AMHI campus), 19 Elkins Lane, Augusta. The results will be made public at that time. Each race will take about half an hour to process.

The affected primary races include: The Democratic and Republican nominations for the office of Governor; the Democratic nomination for the Representative to Congress in Congressional District 2; and the Republican nomination for Representative to the Maine Legislature in House District 75.   

Elections staff will determine if these races have a majority winner based on the first-choice voting results, and if not, the winner will be determined via ranked-choice voting rounds. This tabulation process is expected to take only a few minutes as the computer algorithm calculates the results.

Following the verbal results announcement, the unofficial results data from these races will be posted as Excel files on the Election Results page, and marked as “unofficial.” As always, official results for all primary races and the Referendum Election will be available and posted 20 days after the election.

General Courier of South Portland began collecting ballots and memory devices from all of Maine’s municipalities beginning Thursday, June 14. (Hand-count towns submitted their ballots; municipalities that use tabulators submitted their memory devices). Secretary of State Department staff members began processing that material on Friday, June 15, which included unlocking and unsealing each ballot box; unsealing and uploading all the memory devices; loading all of these votes into the high-speed tabulator results program; and then certifying the results to ensure accuracy.