People waited for up to two hours to vote in Maine’s largest city on Tuesday as heavy in-person turnout and high levels of absentee voting put the state on track to exceed its record for a presidential election.
Both urban and rural cities and towns reported heavy turnout on Tuesday. It was perhaps most exaggerated in Portland, where long lines formed before 7 a.m. at the Portland Expo. Later on in the morning, it took a Bangor Daily News reporter two hours to cast a ballot there.
The strong turnout is on top of heavy absentee voting that has not been seen aside from of the 2020 presidential election reshaped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly 362,000 people had voted that way as of Monday afternoon, a figure that equated to 44 percent of all ballots cast during the election four years ago. Maine saw record turnout during that election.
Some places were already closing in on their 2020 numbers. Brunswick saw just over 14,000 votes in that election. As of 10 a.m. Tuesday, a clerk said more than 2,400 voters had cast in-person ballots alongside 8,200 absentee ballots already received by the town.
Turnout looked heavy but manageable in cities across the 2nd Congressional District, which is deciding a major race between Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Golden and state Rep. Austin Theriault, R-Fort Kent. Bangor had less than 1,600 in-person voters as of 10 a.m., while Lewiston City Clerk Kathy Montejo said there was a steady flow of voters with no long lines.
No major voting issues were reported on Tuesday morning. Several schools were targeted by hoax “swatting threats” that are being seen nationally, but voting was only interrupted briefly at two polling places in South Portland.
Lines were moving smoothly at the Westbrook Community Center on Tuesday, but there was still a bit of tension around the high-stakes election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris that is largely seen as a toss-up by national observers.
In the 10-minute queue to enter ballots in the scanner, an older man wearing a T-shirt depicting a photo of former President Donald Trump fist-pumping after his Pennsylvania assassination attempt was talking loudly to another man about how he stopped voting for Democrats after discovering they were a party of “lies.”
One woman made several comments under her breath about how she wished he would stop talking. Eventually, another woman turned to him and said, “Sir, do you mind not talking about that?” He did.
In Caribou, 74-year-old retired nurse Daryl Bouchard said he was voting for Trump because Harris “has not done anything” and would bring “more of the same” to the White House. Larry Thibodeau, a 75-year-old retiree, cited a simple reason that he was voting for Harris.
“I think she has a positive vision for the future,” Thibodeau said. “[Trump’s] vision is too dark for me.”
BDN reporters Callie Ferguson, Kathleen O’Brien, Melissa Lizotte, Troy R. Bennett, Jules Walkup and Zara Norman contributed to this report.
