At a Rotary breakfast meeting on Oct. 25, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap reassured the audience that Maine’s election is safe.

At the meeting at Newcastle’s Second Congregational Church, Dunlap said Maine has a long history of little to no election fraud. There is a small chance that a person might be registered to vote in two towns, but Dunlap said he has never seen that happen. The most likely scenario would involve people who are registered to vote in one location to vote in a spring election, but change residences before the fall election. This could happen with students, he said, or possibly older people who move to warmer climates in the fall. It would take some effort on the part of the voter, since one of the votes would have to be absentee, and the voter would know that he or she was doing something wrong.

However, he reiterated that he had never seen it happen during any of his nearly four terms in office, with one exception, and that voter was simply unclear on the process. “Sometimes people have concerns that people vote numerous times if they have registered in multiple places, but we haven’t seen that happen in over ten years of watching for it,” he said.

The notion that people would vote in someone else’s name, however, he discounted. The voter needs too much information, such as the exact street address and the full name of the person he or she was trying to impersonate.

And, Dunlap said, local officials take their electoral jobs very seriously. City and town clerks recruit local people to oversee the election. In many of Maine’s smaller towns and cities, most voters are well-known to someone in the polling place. After the ballots are cast, they are only counted after the polls close and when members of all parties can observe the tally. Dunlap said no voting in Maine is done via the internet, so there is no potential for hacking to occur. Because Maine has a paper ballot system, recounts can happen if there are any questions.

The kind of “rigging” being alleged by some in national politics would require a massive conspiracy involving tens of thousands of poll workers from both parties, Dunlap said. “In reality, that just doesn’t happen,” he said. “In Maine, your vote counts.”