On Tuesday, Mainers will vote for a governor, their congressional representatives and a new Legislature, as well as decide local races.
This is everything you need to know to be ready to vote.
Find your polling place.
Polls are open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., although some places open earlier. You can find your polling place here.
You can register to vote at the polls.
Maine is one of 21 states that allows same-day registration. Just bring identification and proof of residency to your polling place to register and vote. You do not need identification to vote, only to register. You can check your voter registration status by entering your name, date of birth and current address on the site Vote.org.
It’s not too late to drop off your absentee ballot.
All ballots will be counted as long as they are returned to your city or town clerk by 8 p.m. Tuesday. Maine does not require voters to cite a reason for voting absentee.
If you have recently mailed in your ballot, check the state’s lookup tool to ensure your local clerk has received it. If not, you can vote in person and your absentee ballot will be voided.
Here’s how to research the candidates and issues.
You can learn about all of the candidates and where they stand on the biggest issues by reading the Bangor Daily News voter’s guide. We distilled the historic and stated positions of top-tier candidates and put questions to every candidate for Maine’s 186 state legislative seats and printed their responses verbatim.
You can also read our comprehensive coverage of the 2022 election here.
The winner of Maine’s 2nd Congressional District race likely won’t be known on election night.
Ranked-choice voting, passed by Mainers in a 2016 referendum, differs from traditional elections in which a candidate who gets a plurality of votes wins. In ranked-choice elections, voters can choose multiple candidates in order of their preference.
A winner is declared if a candidate wins an outright majority. But if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of total votes, the last-place finisher is eliminated and the second choices of their voters are then considered and reallocated to the remaining candidates.
The 2nd Congressional District race between Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, Republican former U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin and independent Tiffany Bond is likely to be the only major race in Maine decided by ranked-choice voting this year. If no candidate emerges with a majority of first-place votes in Tuesday’s election, a ranked-choice voting count is expected to take just over a week to finish.
Learn more about how ranked-choice voting works here.
In Maine, media outlets collect results from cities and towns and project outcomes.
All election results reported on Tuesday night will be unofficial. Media outlets obtain these unofficial results directly from cities and towns, which have two days to send final results to the secretary of state’s office for certification. Only at that point are results official.
In Maine, the BDN and the Associated Press are the only media outlets that gather statewide results from clerks independently. Because of that, our results will often look different than those of other Maine outlets as we put cities and towns into our systems at different times. The BDN reports races down to the local level across the state.
The AP and other organizations — including the BDN’s partner, Decision Desk HQ — use those results to typically project a winner before the unofficial count is complete. These outlets employ statisticians who consider a range of factors — including the size of a candidate’s lead and the partisan leanings of towns yet to report — before making a final projection when they are nearly certain that a result will not change. BDN editors sign off before they are made public.
Follow the results.
Once you vote and get your sticker, you can sit back and watch the results come in. We will start listing results after the polls close at 8 p.m. Keep an eye on our election results page and follow our live blog.