Does Maine require physical delivery of ballot records for a ranked-choice runoff?

Maine requires physical delivery of ballot records for a ranked-choice runoff, which can delay the results.

After every election, local officials count ballots and prepare an official return showing each candidate’s total. In a ranked-choice contest, those totals only show voters’ first choices.

That’s enough if one candidate has a majority. Otherwise, the state must examine each ballot’s lower-ranked choices, which townwide returns don’t show.

Maine then collects ballot records from each municipality by courier. It receives sealed memory devices from towns using tabulators and paper ballots from those that count by hand. The materials are then brought to Augusta for a central count.

The software can calculate later rounds quickly after the records arrive. The slower work is in collecting, checking and preparing ballot-level records from towns across Maine before a winner can be determined.