AUGUSTA (NEWS CENTER Maine) -- Maine’s big experiment with ranked choice voting will have its big test on Tuesday.
The Secretary of State says the department will be able to run the votes through the ranked choice computer sometime Tuesday to determine the winners of two high profile primary races.
More votes were delivered to the ballot counting facility Monday. Couriers brought in sealed boxes and envelopes from what was described as the final cities and towns to have their ballots and voting machine memory sticks picked up.
Inside the facility, all that vote information was loaded into the RCV computer for eventual counting. Secretary of State Matt Dunlap told NEWS CENTER Maine he is hoping they could get most of the information loaded before the end of the day. That would clear the way to finish off everything, and then run the ranked choice program through the computer.
“Hopefully,” Dunlap said, “we will be able to wrap it up sooner rather than later. Of course, everything would have to snap into place pretty neatly to be done today. We anticipate really being done tomorrow to run the tabulation.”
As it turned out, Dunlap’s prediction was remarkably close. The department’s spokeswoman reported late Monday afternoon that they planned to finish loading all the ballots during the evening, and then run the count during the day Tuesday.
That will be welcome news for some of the campaigns.
The Democrats running for Governor are anxious for the results. Democrat Janet Mills leads Adam Cote in the party primary for Governor by about five percentage points.
In the Democratic Second District Congressional primary, Jared Golden leads Lucas St. Clair and Craig Olsen with roughly 49 percent of the vote.