In wee hours, vote counting continued

BANGOR – ‘Twas the night after elections and all through the city, not a creature was stirring except a small group of bleary-eyed women, still counting ballots at City Hall.

The tired poll workers counted a record 3,913 absentee ballots at Central Voting, deep into the early hours of Wednesday.

Between 1 and 4 a.m., workers at the Bangor city clerk’s office were busy sorting, counting, and recounting 200 to 300 ballots that the city’s scanning machine did not read correctly.

It was the largest number of absentee ballots to be cast in the history of Bangor, and counting actually began at 7 a.m. Tuesday. Almost 20 percent of the city’s turnout were absentee votes.

The 20 hours of ballot counting was crucial to the future of the Maine Senate. The absentee votes almost certainly would decide whether Democrat Joe Perry or Republican Tom Sawyer would win the Senate District 32 seat.

That race determined the majority party of the state Senate. In the end, Perry won.

The stakes Wednesday morning were high, and the vote counters knew it.

“We’re a little silly,” Betty Girard, ward clerk for Central Voting, said with a smile, far into the task at hand.

The women had an audience watching as the white and green ballots were passed around the small and crowded room.

Mike Dunn, the Democratic House District 18 candidate from Bangor, sat in a folding chair just beyond the doorway, anxiously awaiting confirmation that he had edged out Republican Jason W. Frederick of Bangor in a tight race.

Two other Democratic workers traded stories of the campaign and made cell phone calls with voting updates. And Republican poll-watcher Harrison Clark kept an eye on the ballots as he chatted amiably with the Democrats.

The hand-counting process seemed straightforward enough but was painstakingly slow.

The absentee ballots are the same as the regular ballots that voters at the polls filled out Tuesday, Election Day, by marker. The two folded sheets, coming from nursing homes, hospitals, overseas and from anyone who wanted to file one, were for national, state and local elections. Absentee voters, like their poll-going counterparts, had to fill in arrows to indicate their choices.

Absentee ballots are difficult to count by machine, City Clerk Patti Dubois said, because ballots folded to fit in an envelope have a tendency to be missed by the Optec scanning equipment.

Some ballots skipped over had arrows completed by light pencil marks or scratchy ballpoint pen instead of the regulation thick black marker.

“That’s kind of normal in absentee voting,” Dubois said Wednesday afternoon. “People use their favorite Mickey Mouse pen, and it can be hard to read.”

Other voters correctly completed the arrows and then circled or rewrote the names of their chosen candidates. The machine rejected those, too.

All the ballots, however, were counted. The final numbers were released Wednesday afternoon.

Dubois said early rumors that many of the rejected votes had been damaged were greatly exaggerated.

“We had one ballot caught in the machine,” she said. “It had a Post-It note attached to it.”

The damaged ballots concerned Dubois less than did an overall lack of poll workers at Bangor’s eight wards during the record voter turnout on Tuesday.

“I had difficulty getting enough workers,” she said. “We really could have used more people.”

The new city clerk spent her first month in Bangor preparing for the elections but realized she needed more time. “I’m hoping to improve the process,” Dubois said.

While Dubois did not specify her improvement ideas, City Council Chairman Dan Tremble was open with one of his.

“I think it would be a step in the right direction if we could consolidate to one voting place,” he said. “Larger cities than us have also used one voting place.”

The droopy vote counters, sustained by pizza, coffee, soda and a little sleep, were ready to head home by 2 a.m. Wednesday. Dubois, who hadn’t eaten since Monday and got only two hours of sleep Wednesday morning, was grateful to those who counted and those who waited.

“I would like to thank people who were patient,” she said. “We did the best we could.”