We’d hoped to find out the winner in Maine’s 2nd District tonight, as state officials planned to run the ranked-choice voting tabulation to determine whether Democratic Rep. Jared Golden or his challenger, former Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin, would clear the 50 percent mark after reallocating the second preferences of voters who cast a ballot for independent Tiffany Bond. But issues with memory sticks provided by two municipalities prevented the tabulation, which means state officials now have to retrieve the ballots from those localities and rescan them. As a result, we probably won’t know the final outcome until sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening. Golden has 153,051 first-choice votes (48.5 percent), ahead of Poliquin’s 141,191 (44.7 percent) and Bond’s 21,581 (6.8 percent), so the incumbent is not far away from the 50 percent + 1 mark needed to win.
