AUGUSTA (NEWS CENTER Maine) — All over Maine, town and city clerks are making final preparations for Tuesday’s primary election, and the first statewide use of ranked-choice voting in the country.
The process will involve transporting ballots and voting machine "memory sticks" from about 500 communities to a central counting site in Augusta. There, paper ballots will be scanned into the computer while digital memory sticks will be downloaded.
Once all that has been done, the actual RCV count will be done by computer.
The counting is expected to be quick. But the Secretary of State says getting ready for the count will be a fairly long process, meaning vote results may not be known until a week or more after Election Day.
Below is a video from the Secretary of State's Office, explaining how RCV works: