A September 18 recount upheld the outcome of Wiscasset's vote on the planning department budget. The numbers changed slightly, but, in the end, the one-vote margin the budget won with stayed the same.

The result Wednesday was 355 in favor of the budget and 354 opposed, Town Clerk Christine Wolfe said.

In the original count following the September 10 vote, the budget also won by a single vote, 353-352.

The last vote in question during the recount was one in which neither the circle for “yes,” nor the one for “no” was filled in. But the letter “o” in “no” was filled in, Wolfe said.

After lawyers for the town and the Maine Municipal Association were consulted, that vote was counted as a “no.”

The recount stemmed from a petition two members of the town's budget committee submitted as residents, not on the committee's behalf. The panel had opposed the planning budget.

The hand count resulted in a total of two votes being counted that the machine had been unable to read, Wolfe wrote in an email about the recount results.

Unreadable votes happen in a machine count when voters do not adhere to the directions for completing the ballot, Wolfe wrote.

“I do not believe that the integrity of using a tabulator can be called into question as it is the lack of direction following that most likely caused two ballots to not be tabulated by the Accuvote machine,” Wolfe wrote.

“Wiscasset's election clerks do a phenomenal job and should be very proud of the integrity of our elections,” the email continued.

Susan Johns can be reached at 207-844-4633 or susanjohns@wiscassetnewspaper.com