AUGUSTA — The hum of chatter and ruffling papers filled a nondescript room in a low-slung building on the north end of the capital city. A Portland librarian crocheted and TV crews trickled in while state workers opened a Christmas morning’s worth of boxes and envelopes. A whiteboard listing Maine’s 16 counties marked their progress.

And deep into the wee hours of Friday morning, a few Mainers waited for election results that never seemed to come.

The quiet scene belied the stakes, and the frustration of many onlookers Friday. For nearly a full week, the fate of the Maine primaries hung in the balance while state election officials conducted ranked-choice runoffs in key races.

The many contenders for governor and U.S. House representative from Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, who did not reach the requisite majority in the first round of voting on June 9, aspire to work in the State House or the U.S. Capitol.

But first, their path ran through the decidedly less stately Maine Department of Public Safety headquarters, where staff from the Maine Department of the Secretary of State painstakingly collected, sorted and accounted for tens of thousands of ballots.

They worked deep into the night Thursday into early Friday, much to the consternation of at least one candidate.

“Maine voters cast their ballots on June 9,” said Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles at a Thursday news conference. “It is now June 18, and we still don’t have a final, certified result, after nine days.”

Throughout the week, sundry campaign staffers, reporters and other onlookers occupied rows of seats for the public to view the process.

“It’s subdued, until it isn’t,” Mike Hein, 56, a former state employee who lives in Fairfield and had watched ranked-choice counting before, said Wednesday. “The week that it’s been since Election Day, I think, proves that they’re taking it seriously, that they’re doing it methodically.”

On his shirt, he sported stickers for Nirav Shah, the former Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention director who led the first-round of the Democratic gubernatorial primary, and for Graham Platner, who had already secured the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.

Patrick Davis, a 78-year-old retired boat builder and habitual election observer, said he had awoken at 5:30 a.m. in Addison to drive to the tabulation room in Augusta.

“This one’s been smoother,” Davis said Wednesday, comparing the count to past ones he’s seen. “I mean, if I see something wrong, I’ll say it.”

He said he had voted for Charles, a former U.S. official who led the pack among first choices in the Republican governor’s race.

At noon Wednesday, Kate McBrien, the chief deputy secretary of state, rolled the whiteboard — with each county denoted as having all its ballots squared away, or not — to a mounted computer that was filming a livestream. She provided an update, then made way for cafeteria food to be brought into the officials’ area for lunch.

Jay Gruber, 37, who works in the Portland Public Library, sat nearby crocheting a multicolored baby blanket for a niece they are expecting. They took the hourlong drive north for the morning.

“The mundane parts of the way our society functions, and our government functions, is really interesting, to actually get up close and see how it works,” Gruber said.

At one point after lunch, Julie Flynn, the deputy secretary of state who oversees elections, brought a box of ballots from Woodville to a table facing the public section: They needed to be hand-counted. She narrated each step as she and a colleague unpacked the box.

To witness the unfolding process was partway between tuning into a cooking demonstration and watching paint dry. One campaign representative likened the tedious work to the TV show “Severance,” in which workers’ business is entirely separated from their outside personal lives.

Hanging over the proceedings were nagging unanswered questions, the subject of chitchat among spectators: Would the first-choice front-runners in the three ranked-choice elections — Shah, Charles and state Sen. Joe Baldacci — hold on in the final tallies? How many rounds would each election take? And, perhaps most of all, when would the wait end?

In a midafternoon press conference Wednesday, McBrien said the process would continue into the evening.

“If we feel like we’re not running into many problems, we’ve got a good groove, we think there’s only a few hours ahead of us, we’re just going to keep going,” McBrien said.

But within an hour, the forecast for producing final results Wednesday dimmed when officials decided that the counts from South Berwick had to be clarified by retrieving the town’s ballots. Just after 4 p.m., McBrien announced that the results would not come until Thursday after all.

The following morning, staffers resumed their places at long plastic tables, picking up where they left off, running ballots from one remaining community through the tabulator and proofing spreadsheets to be sure every ballot and every vote was accounted for.

One table against a side wall was stocked with snacks — bottled water, fruit gummies and cookies — for the day’s work. As the day wore on, card games, crossword puzzles and books kept observers entertained as staffers continued their work. For hours, the end of the process seemed like it would never come as the timeline for results kept getting pushed back.

At a 3 p.m. gaggle with reporters, McBrien was asked if anything in particular was leading to delays. She said there wasn’t any one thing.

“The most important part of ranked-choice voting tabulation is that all the information is in and it’s correct and that we can verify that, so that when we run the ranked-choice tabulation, we’re running it from the correct information,” she said. “That just takes time.”

Finally, a little after 9 p.m., cheering erupted — the two hour warning for results had come. After days of waiting, Maine would finally know its winners … after a couple more hours of tedium.

Staff writer Rachel Ohm contributed to this report.