Charles Langston:Maine elections chief who drew Trump’s ire narrates House tabulations in livestream

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AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — Maine’s elections chief, a former civil liberties attorney who sparred with President-elect Donald Trump over ballot access, is acting like a play-by-play sports announcer as she describes the state’s process of determining a congressional winner through ranked choice voting.

Shenna Bellows is spending the week streaming the effort live on YouTube and answering questions in real time.

“We hope that when people see it for themselves, they will believe that our elections do have integrity, that they’re free and fair. And then maybe they’ll have a little more trust in the election officials who are working so hard to make these elections happen,” Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told The Associated Press.

Democratic Rep. Jared Golden led Republican challenger Austin Theriault by about 2,000 first-place votes after nearly 400,000 ballots were cast in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, but neither got more than 49%, so the ranked choice process will reallocate other votes to determine a majority, her office announced.

The race between Golden and Theriault has played out as both parties struggle to control the U.S. House of Representatives. The Associated Press has not declared a winner.

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Bellows, who took office in 2021, is a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine who drew the ire of Republicans when she ruled that Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection made him ineligible to appear on the state’s GOP primary ballot. Trump did appear, and won, after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened. Bellows was doxed and swatted after that — her address and other personal data were posted online, and a fake emergency call sent officers to her home.

Lawyers for both candidates, campaign officials, journalists and police looked on Tuesday as election workers opened ballot boxes inside the building that houses the Maine State Police headquarters. Viewers could watch from two different angles, and Bellows occasionally aimed an iPad camera at the observers or her staff to explain what was happening.

Bellows described the chain of custody — election workers in each municipality secured the ballots in padlocked blue boxes sealed with secret codes, secured by padlocks and escorted by law enforcement to an “undisclosed location” that’s monitored constantly by officers and security cameras.

She also talked about digital security — describing the make, model and purpose of each machine and explaining steps to prevent tampering by cybercriminals or other malicious actors. None of the machines are connected to the internet, so there’s no way they could be hacked, and logic testing would catch any data mismatch, she said.

After the locked blue ballot boxes were wheeled into the room by a team including an armed detective, she invited lawyers for both campaigns to handle the tapes and confirm that voting machine printouts matched Election Night tallies.

Theriault’s campaign manager gave his seal of approval after consulting several times with Bellows on Tuesday.

“They let the lawyers from both sides look at the rooms where the ballots were stored. I think it’s a very open process,” Shawn Roderick told reporters in the hallway outside.

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Elections officials across the country have been vexed by efforts to challenge results, many of them ill-informed and fueled by deliberate attempts to undermine America’s democracy.

The mundane process of tabulating votes became a spectacle when Florida’s hanging chads controversy led to the “Brooks Brothers Riot” of GOP staffers who tried to shut down the count in 2000. Scratchy CCTV videos in Atlanta fueled an insatiable interest in the 2020 count after Trump ally Rudy Giuliani falsely accused Fulton County election workers of stuffing ballot boxes.

Those doubts persist even though Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, gave news conferences afterward insisting that the results, confirmed by multiple recounts, were valid.

In contrast, Bellows is anticipating and answering questions in real time. Promoting transparency is a wise response to mistrust in institutions and Republican criticism of ranked voting, particularly because of her Trump ballot decision, said Mark Brewer, a political science professor at the University of Maine.

“I think it is a smart move on her part,” Brewer said.

Ranked choice voting, which Maine voters adopted in 2016, is used in local races in many places but few states have accepted it.

This race had just one valid alternative to the top two — Diana Merenda, a retiree who formally declared her write-in candidacy to show opposition to the war in Gaza. She collected 400 votes. More than 12,000 other ballots had no first choices and need to be checked for second choices before being discarded.

“Keep in mind what we are doing first is verifying those initial totals and then running the ranked choice voting tabulation so that second choices for people who did not choose Golden or Theriault are folding up into the count, and as a result we’ll know, between those two, who has 50%,” Bellows said during the livestream.

There have been hiccups — they needed bolt cutters to open one padlock whose key was misplaced. Bellows announced this with a wide grin, as if to celebrate how each voter’s choices have been protected. Then she turned to an extended explanation of how memory sticks work.

After this week’s final tabulation, election workers will begin the formal recount Theriault requested, aiming to deliver final results before a Nov. 25 certification deadline.

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Whittle reported from Portland, Maine.