A recount of a close school board race in Bucksport ended in a tie on Thursday evening, and the town doesn’t yet know how it will resolve the situation.
Emily Fitzgerald challenged incumbent Keith Kneeland Jr. for a three-year seat representing the town on the RSU 25 school board. Unofficial election results Tuesday showed that she won by three votes: 773 to his 770.
Kneeland requested the recount, which found that he, too, had received 773 votes. Fitzgerald’s number remained the same, while the recount initially showed that 187 ballots were left blank. That left one unaccounted for of the 1,734 ballots the town had recorded on Tuesday.
“It’s uncharted territory that we’re in right now,” Town Manager Jacob Gran said of the apparent tie as the search for the missing ballot began. “It certainly is pretty unusual.”
The final ballot was found in a search through boxes of state ballots — blank.
That means the race has ended in a tie, an evidently unprecedented situation for Bucksport that left next steps uncertain on Thursday evening.
“The town does not have anything in our charter or anything that we do that specifies what happens in this situation,” Gran said.
It’s possible the Secretary of State’s office will get involved to answer that question, he said.
Other Maine municipalities have settled tiebreakers by coin flips or pulling straws, according to Gran; Bucksport plans to consult its town attorney Friday about what to do. In 2021, Portland decided a tied City Council race by pulling a candidate’s name at random from a wooden bowl.
At the close of the recount meeting, attendees said the results show that every vote counts.
