Maine’s 2nd District race heads to ranked-choice runoff. Here’s what to expect.

Maine’s 2nd Congressional District is officially headed to a ranked-choice runoff, the Secretary of State’s Office announced Thursday morning.

Though only two candidates, Democrat Matt Dunlap and Republican Paul LePage, were on the ballot, the one declared write-in prompted ranked choice voting, meaning voters could rank three names on their ballot. 

According to results from the Secretary of State’s Office, of the 341,248 ballots cast in the district, LePage received 49.894% of votes and Dunlap received 48.307% — both failing to get the more than 50% needed to avoid the runoff. 

The announcement comes a day after LePage declared victory in the race. He said his team “has been calling all the towns that haven’t come in yet, and there is no path to victory for my opponent.” 

Dunlap quickly responded that the race was still too close to call. “This race is very close and there are plenty of ballots left to count,” he said.

Polling ahead of Election Day had LePage in the lead, but a strong showing from Democrats nationally likely buoyed Dunlap in Maine’s more conservative 2nd District. The party succeeded in winning both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in response to President Donald Trump’s declining approval.

“The first step in the process will be to verify the vote totals from every municipality to ensure accuracy,” Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said in a statement Thursday. “Once the election night totals are verified, assuming neither candidate received a majority of the votes, which is what we are observing now, we will proceed to the ranked choice voting tabulation.”

The tabulations will begin on Monday at the Maine Department of Public Safety Headquarters in Augusta.

Maine’s elections are run by municipalities. This is a more hyper-local structure than most of the country, where elections are often run at the county level. While municipalities informally report results to the state and media on election night, under Maine law, they have two days to report official counts to the Secretary of State’s Office. 

Ranked choice voting only applies to federal races in the general election, though primary elections for state and federal offices in Maine can use it. 

Like elections past, the tabulation process in Maine will be livestreamed on the Secretary of State’s YouTube page. The public is also invited to watch the process in-person. 

Why is a runoff needed?

A race goes to a ranked-choice runoff if no candidate receives more than 50% of votes on Election Day. That calculation is based on total ballots cast, including blanks and write-ins. 

Gregory Ward is the sole declared write-in candidate in the 2nd District, and the secretary’s office said he received 123 votes in Tuesday’s election, and another 6,017 ballots were blank. 

Blanks led to a runoff in 2024. Golden won a plurality of first-choice votes against Republican Austin Theriault, but received just under 49% of total votes. Golden eventually won the runoff and was officially declared winner after a recount Theriault requested.

And in 2018, Golden defeated incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin in the nation’s first congressional election to use ranked choice voting to determine the winner. 

Golden announced last November that he would not seek reelection. LePage had already announced his campaign, and faced no Republican primary challengers. Dunlap had intended to challenge Golden, and went on to defeat three other candidates in a ranked-choice runoff in the June primary. 

The process

If ranked-choice tabulations take as long as they have in elections past, the outcome should be known by next Friday. 

“We are hoping to expedite the process so that we can have results more quickly, if at all possible,” Bellows said before the election. 

The bulk of that time will be the secretary of state’s staff logging results from every ballot and checking multiple times to ensure the totals line up. 

For example, during the June primary runoffs, the Friday and Monday after the election were spent scanning ballots into a tabulator, uploading thumb drives from municipalities that have in-house tabulators, and hand entering votes on any of those ballots that failed to scan. 

On Tuesday and Wednesday, staff checked the votes in the computer against the forms sent in by the municipalities and resolved any discrepancies. While not a requirement, the results from the counties farthest away are typically logged first, so there is adequate time in case any missing materials need to be retrieved. 

“We have some communities that are only reachable by boat,” said Deb McDonough of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters. “It’s just a fact that it’s a complicated logistical task to get all of those votes transferred from the scanner or the paper ballots from the community, such that all of that information is now in a single computer that’s prepared to run the tabulation software.”

That runoff included statewide gubernatorial primaries, and required ballots from every municipality in the state. The gathering process may be quicker for this runoff, because it will only be the 2nd District municipalities. 

On the final two days of the primary runoffs, staff reconciled what is called the cast vote record with the reports from municipalities. The cast vote record is the electronic record, an excel spreadsheet where each line represents one ballot. This reconciliation took a while in June since there were five different runoffs happening, two gubernatorial primaries, a congressional primary and two legislative primaries.  

Actually running the ranked-choice tabulation formula produces results in a matter of minutes.

Last-place candidates are eliminated first and votes are then redistributed to a voter’s next choice. If your first choice makes it to the final round, your ballot will stay with your first choice throughout the tabulations. That’s repeated until one candidate receives more than 50% of votes.

Following the ranked choice tabulation, the losing candidate may request a hand recount. 

The software used is available at no charge from the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. Voters can therefore run the tabulations themselves once the Secretary of State’s Office publishes the cast vote records.