The following statement was issued just before 9:00 pm this evening by the office of the Secretary of State Shenna Bellows regarding the tabulation for the District 2 ranked-choice vote between the two leading candidates Jared Golden (D) and Bruce Poliquin (R):

“As you may know, we had an issue with data from a few memory devices as we were uploading the cast vote records around 6:00 pm tonight, which left us unable to do the ranked choice vote tabulation at this time.  Law enforcement officers went to each of the municipalities with faulty memory devices to retrieve all the ballots from each jurisdiction.  Given that ballots are not segregated in storage by which tabulation they were from, we will need to scan all of these ballots through our DS850 to be counted and remove all vote records from non-faulty memory sticks from these municipalities, so as not to have duplicate records.  The affected municipalities are Bangor, Hampden and Anson.  Given this large number of ballots, scanning them all will take a good amount of time tomorrow, and we don’t expect to run the ranked choice vote tabulation until well into the afternoon.  We will get underway no earlier than 9:00 am., but may be delayed if staff or campaign representatives are delayed due to tomorrow’s weather – snow is forecast.  The proceedings will again be livestreamed on our Facebook page,” according to information received from Emily F. Cook, Communications Director in the office of Secretary of State Emily F. Cook.