LEWISTON – John McCain picked up another 63 votes from Lewiston after missing absentee ballots were counted Wednesday morning, but Barack Obama picked up 371.

That wasn’t enough to change the end result. Obama still won in Lewiston and still won in Maine, and that rule held up and down the city ballots.

“There really wasn’t enough votes anywhere to change the result,” Deputy City Clerk Kelly Mercier said.

Susan Collins still won in Lewiston, and Lewiston voters still bucked the state trend and voted in favor of an Oxford County casino.

Mercier announced late Tuesday night that 585 absentee ballots had been marked incorrectly by voters. Since those ballots are machine-counted, they weren’t included in Tuesday night’s unofficial results. They had to be sorted and counted by hand, and those results were released Wednesday.

Some of the absentee ballots were legitimately mismarked by voters writing in their own candidates. In most cases, voters had used their own ballpoint or felt-tip pens to mark their ballots, instead of pencils.

“Some of them were confused because they use special felt-tip pens at the polls when they come in to vote,” Mercier said. But those pens use a special ink that contains trace amounts of metals. Like pencil lead, those marks can be read by the city’s voting machines. Regular ink is invisible to the machines.

“It didn’t end up being a problem,” Mercier said. “All their votes were tallied, but it just took more work on our part.”