LEWISTON – Most Mainers will be voting on a brand new voting machine system at the polls on Tuesday, Nov. 5.

Earlier this summer, the Secretary of State’s Office rolled out the new voting machines to every town in Maine with a population of 1,000 or greater. The new machine will still accept paper ballots from the voters, but will potentially require some voter interaction with the touch screen on the voting machine system.

In an effort to introduce Lewiston voters to the new system in advance of Tuesday’s election, city staff created a six-minute video demonstration of the new machine. It is available for viewing on the elections page of the city’s website at www.lewistonmaine.gov and it is also available for viewing on YouTube by searching “City of Lewiston voting machines.”

Voters should not see any delay in voting with the new machine. When a voter approaches the machine with their completed ballot, the screen will state “Welcome – Please insert ballot.” Once the voter inserts their ballot, and if they have filled in the ovals on their ballot next to the names of their selected candidate, the screen on the machine will state that the ballot has been accepted and thank them for voting.

If, however, the voter has voted for more candidates than allowed in a certain race (such as “vote for one” and they voted for two), the screen will inform the voter of this and offer them the choice of receiving the ballot back so they can correct it or to have their ballot cast with errors, in which case the votes for that race will not be counted because they voted for more than the allowable limit.

All voters in Maine who will be voting with machine ballots will be using the new style machine. Smaller towns that do not have machines will be hand counting their ballots as usual.

The voting machines have been leased by the state for a five-year period. The lease has been paid for by the state and the lease cost for the machines used to tally city ballots has been paid by the city.

Election workers will be available by every machine to assist the voters as needed.