Is increase in absentee voting altering the political process?
AUGUSTA, Maine — As polls opened Tuesday morning, the big question hanging over Maine’s race for governor was whether independent Eliot Cutler’s late-October surge began early enough to catapult him past Republican and perennial front-runner Paul LePage. By Wednesday morning, voters had answered the question of who would occupy the Blaine House. As for his surge, Cutler said the problem wasn’t that it began too late. Instead, he said, voting began too early thanks to the growing popularity in Maine of absentee ballots. “I think that when you start the election at a very early date, first of all, it deprives people … of the time they need to make up their minds or change their minds,” Cutler said after his concession speech inside his Portland headquarters. In a textbook example of the fluidity of modern elections, Cutler caught up to and nearly stole the Blaine House from Republican Gov.-elect Paul LePage thanks to a wave of last-minute defections from Democrat Libby Mitchell’s campaig
