The polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday, but the question of who will represent Republicans this fall against incumbent U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree remains open.
Mark Holbrook is currently the unofficial winner of the GOP 1st District primary, with a 55-vote edge over Ande Allen Smith. But at a State House press conference Friday, Smith told reporters that he has asked the Maine secretary of state for a recount. A final determination in the race could be weeks away.
A self-professed optimist by nature, Smith says he had mostly enjoyed his campaign experience, until he heard that he had lost by 55 votes.
“I had said in the past we’d never had a bad day in the campaign, I think yesterday probably would have counted as our first,” Smith says.
Those 55 votes were out of nearly 21,000 cast, according to the secretary of state’s office, which Smith has now asked to conduct a recount.
Smith declined to identify any specific voting irregularities that would lead him to suspect that vote was not accurate. Instead, the lawyer and former nuclear submarine engineer says he’s simply assessing the odds.
“Well, I think there’s certainly opportunities for error when you’re at that close of a margin,” Smith says. “I think the automatic recount provisions under state law look to a couple of tenths of percentages for sure.”
Smith says he will be meeting with members of his legal team to determine whether he will ask for a full-blown recount of the entire district or evaluate the ballots from some of the larger voting precincts to see if there are any significant changes.
Although only around 21,000 voters — or about 12 percent of the Republicans registered in the district — cast ballots in the race, Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap says that wouldn’t make a full recount any easier.
“That could take quite a while, even in a low turnout election,” Dunlap says, “because we have to get all the ballots from all the towns, and there’s quite a few towns in the 1st Congressional District. So we would try to work it out with them.”
Unlike many communities in the 2nd Congressional District, the vast majority of 1st District cities and towns use tabulation machines to tally votes — another factor that Dunlap says makes large ballot discrepancies unlikely.
“Bear in mind that almost all of the votes that were cast in the 1st CD were cast using the DS-200 tabulating machines, which are a scanning machine that is very, very accurate and have an almost nonexistent error rate,” Dunlap says. “So that’s why we would want to probably do some kind of a weather gauge on this to see if there is any movement in any of these towns and then ask the candidates at what point they want to reconsider the recount going forward.”
Smith’s opponent and the unofficial winner, Mark Holbrook, says he’s prepared to go through the recount process and is confident that he will prevail. In fact, Holbrook, a Brunswick counselor, has already moved his campaign into General Election mode.
“We started retooling the campaign, getting ready to go after Congresswoman Pingree, starting to get some other things in line,” Holbrook says. “This is going to be a much bigger operation and we’re going to open up both campaign headquarters north and south. So there’s a lot of logistics going to work on this campaign.”
For election watchers such as University of Maine political science professor Mark Brewer, the 2016 1st District GOP primary will be remembered for being decided by one of the thinnest margins in Maine history. But Brewer says that’s about all anyone will remember.
“Chellie Pingree is about as close to an electoral lock as you can get,” he says. “She’s a great fit for her district. She’s incredibly popular with her constituents. She’s been re-elected now a number of times with ever increasing margins. Whoever her opponent is is going to have an incredibly difficult time raising money on their own. I mean you can never say somebody has zero chance of winning an election because I guess that simply doesn’t exist. But whoever gets this Republican nomination, good luck to them, because they’re going to have one incredibly difficult uphill climb to beat Chellie Pingree.”
In the 2012 presidential election, Pingree was opposed by former state GOP Sen. Jonathan Courtney, who had better name recognition than either Smith or Holbrook. She defeated Courtney with 62 percent of the vote.