Missing thumb drives delay ballot results in Bath, West Bath, Bowdoinham

Ballot results in Bath, West Bath and Bowdoinham were slowed after the June 9 primary when one Bath flash drive was left out, one Bowdoinham drive could not be read, and election workers had to fall back on the paper ballots. The glitches put a sharp focus on chain-of-custody procedures in Sagadahoc County, where voters were waiting to learn how local and statewide races would settle.

In Bath, law enforcement retrieved the missing drive after city officials realized it had not been sent. In Bowdoinham, officials said one flash drive was unreadable, so workers scanned the paper ballots and tabulated the race from those paper records instead. West Bath’s results were swept into the same delay as the county’s local returns were processed.

The Maine Secretary of State’s Office, which supervises elections and tabulates official results, said its Elections Division advises officials in 500 municipalities, prepares 1,800 separate ballot types and other election materials, and oversees recounts. The office also said portable data drives are collected by a Maine State Police detail and transported to Augusta, a safeguard built into the process to protect custody of election results.

The timing made the problem more sensitive. On June 10, the secretary of state announced that three races were moving on to ranked-choice voting tabulation because no candidate won a majority of first-choice votes cast. Maine uses ranked-choice voting in statewide and federal primaries when no candidate clears that threshold, so any delay in transferring results can affect how quickly voters see the statewide picture.

The June 9 primary included federal, state and county nominations, including contests for sheriff and district attorney. That made the quality of ballot handling especially important in Sagadahoc County, where a missing or unreadable drive could ripple beyond one town and into the broader statewide count.

Statewide, a separate Biddeford flash-drive dispute added political heat. The Maine GOP criticized Shenna Bellows and ranked-choice voting over the delay, but the Secretary of State’s Office said the claim that the drive was lost in transit was false. Officials said the correct drive was later retrieved and taken to Augusta.

For Bath, West Bath and Bowdoinham, the immediate lesson is straightforward: every drive has to be sent, every drive has to be readable, and every paper ballot has to remain ready to carry the count when technology does not.