AUGUSTA (AP) – Following tradition and constitutional requirements, Maine’s four electors will meet in the State House on Monday to do what voters ordered on Nov. 4: Cast all of their ballots for Barack Obama and Joe Biden for president and vice president.

While everybody knows the outcome of the election, it becomes official when the 538 members of the Electoral College vote in Augusta and other state capitals across the country.

Robert O’Brien of Peaks Island, one of Maine’s electors, said the fact that he’ll be casting a ballot says a lot about how the system has remained true to founding fathers, whose Electoral College was a compromise between election of the president by Congress and by popular vote.

“I’m no muckety muck in politics,” said O’Brien, a hardware store employee. “But the fact that Joe the hardware store guy is getting to cast one of the 365 votes for president of the United States, that says a lot about what the founding fathers intended, that this be a people’s democracy.”

Democrat Obama won Maine with 58 percent of the vote to 41 percent for Republican John McCain. He also won in both congressional districts, an important point in Maine, one of only two states that allow electoral votes to be divvied up by district.

Maine has never divided its electoral votes, but other state, Nebraska, did indeed split its electoral votes on Election Day.

Monday’s vote carries special meaning for the chairwoman of Maine’s electors: Jill Duson is Portland’s first black mayor, and she’ll be voting for the nation’s first black president.

“Every time I think of it, I get a little misty eyed, getting to vote for the first black president,” said Duson. “I am undone by the election of Barack Obama and what it says to me as a black American, and his victory in the whitest state,” she said.

The popular vote was closer that the Electoral College tallies would suggest. The final count gave Obama 365 electoral votes, well over the 270 he needed to win, and McCain 173.

Electors are pledged remain true to the candidate of the party that chose them, and Maine state law requires them to cast a ballot for the winner in the area which they represent. But the U.S. Constitution does not require them to cast a ballot for any particular candidate.

While presidential electors have rarely turned on their designated candidates, there’s an organized efforts to persuade them to do so this year, O’Brien said.

O’Brien, one of Maine’s two at-large electors, said he received a packet from a group that questions Obama’s citizenship, but he dismissed the plea as “a pretty desperate attempt” to derail the president-elect’s right to be formally – and finally – elected.

In Maine, electors are chosen at their state party conventions, two of them at large and one representing each congressional district. The other at-large elector is Tracie Reed of Portland. Duson is the 1st Congressional District elector, and Samuel Shapiro of Waterville, a former state treasurer and longtime Democratic activist, is the 2nd District designee.

O’Brien said he was inspired to run for elector by the historic nature of the 2008 campaign. “Any presidential election is historic. But this one was particularly so,” said O’Brien, referring to the election of America’s first black president. “It’s a kind of a unique position to be in.”

—

On the Net:

Electoral College: www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/laws.html

AP-ES-12-14-08 1031EST