Maine’s ranked-choice voting woes continue.
Secretary of State Matt Dunlap announced Monday his office had to retabulate the July primary election races decided by ranked-choice voting after staff uploaded the wrong file into the tabulating software last month.
In a press release issued Monday, the office said that “during the proofreading of the tabulation of the nominating contests decided by Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) it was discovered that staff selected the wrong file while uploading ballot images…” In addition, it was discovered that, in another town, a secure memory device “suffered an error preventing the upload of all the ballot images stored on it.”
The release said both issues had been addressed and to complete an accurate tabulation, the office’s Elections Division would run a tabulation again Monday at 4 p.m. to properly reflect the votes cast on Election Day.
While the final results from Election Day remain unchanged after the Secretary of State’s second go at accurately tabulating the ranked-choice contest, the final margins of victory did change slightly due to 13,000 new votes being included in the calculation.
For example, in the first tabulation of Maine’s Second Congressional District Republican primary contest, Dale Crafts had a lead in the first round of 45.66 percent to Adrienne Bennett’s 31.80 percent, with Eric Brakey trailing both candidates at 22.53 percent. The tabulation performed Monday had Crafts with 45.02 percent of the vote in the first round, 32.19 percent for Bennett and 22.78 percent for Brakey.
Crafts final tally was reduced from 58.54 percent of the vote to 57.99 in the tabulation performed Monday. Neither total reflects a true majority of the votes cast on Election Day.
File under yikes: @MESecOfState needs to rerun July primary election results because of an error. #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/VonnkKhhPz
— Michael Shepherd (@mikeshepherdME) August 3, 2020
