Results from nation's first statewide ranked-choice voting election could be announced as soon as Tuesday.
State election officials expect they'll soon finish the process of scanning ballots collected from over 500 municipalities. After that, they'll run a count of first-place votes to confirm totals reported by town clerks on Election Day and to determine which of the primary contests will move into the runoff tabulation.
In ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If a candidate achieves a majority of first-place votes after the initial count, they win. This was the case for Shawn Moody, who secured the Republican gubernatorial nomination on Election night.
But the runoff is almost certainly necessary in the seven-way Democratic gubernatorial primary where Attorney General Janet Mills posted a slight lead, but no outright majority, over attorney and combat veteran Adam Cote.
Preliminary totals showed that assistant House leader Jared Golden had a majority in the three-way Democratic primary for the 2nd Congressional District seat, but the margin was close enough that state officials will need to verify the result.
