BANGOR – With most of Tuesday’s election results in, an incumbent city councilor, a former councilor and a newcomer appeared to be the winners in an eight-way race for three City Council seats.

The wild card was the estimated 4,000 absentee ballots not yet tallied by election officials. About 500 of those, however, could not be read by the voting machine. At about 2:30 a.m., they were being counted by hand.

Those totals weren’t expected to be available until today and could change the outcome, especially for third place.

As of press time Wednesday morning, incumbent Councilor Annie Allen was the clear leader, with 4,806 votes. Susan Hawes, seeking her first council term, followed closely, with 4,388.

Richard Stone, a former councilor, was in the lead for election to the third seat, with 3,504 votes, though his lead over fellow candidates Sheila Pechinski and Miles Theeman was slim. Pechinski had 3,395 votes and Theeman, 3,386 votes.

The other two council candidates were Kenneth Buckley, who had 2,671 votes, and George Burgoyne, with 2,211.

On the education side of the ballot, voters re-elected James Cox and Phyllis Shubert to the Bangor School Committee. Cox and Shubert both ran unopposed.

In another vote almost too close to call, city voters narrowly approved a local referendum question seeking to authorize existing debt. As of press time, voters were split 52 percent to 48 percent in favor, or 5,683 to 5,256.

The measure was designed to mitigate some of the adverse effects of a proposed statewide tax cap, which failed on Tuesday.

The idea behind the Bangor ballot question was to qualify debt approved by city councilors as “voter approved,” so that the city could repay it outside of the limit the tax cap would have imposed.