AUGUSTA — A review of Election Day documents has revealed that crucial questions about 21 mystery ballots in the Maine Senate District 25 election — which changed the outcome of the race after a recount — remain unanswered.

A major factor in that reversal was 21 additional ballots from the town of Long Island that were discovered on the night of recount, all of which contained a vote for Republican Cathleen Manchester of Gray.

However, there is no documentation that any voters cast those ballots.

On Election Day, Falmouth Democrat Catherine Breen appeared to have won the tight race by 32 votes. After a Nov. 18 recount — one contested by the Maine Democratic Party — Manchester was declared the victor with an 11-vote margin.

The 21 ballots were not accounted for in the original tally from Long Island’s election warden, Town Clerk Brenda Singo, and a bipartisan review of the town’s incoming voter list, or “voter manifest” — a list of who voted in this year’s election — shows that there were no voters that could be matched with the new ballots.

According to results provided to the Bangor Daily News and the Associated Press by the town on Election Day, 171 ballots were cast in Long Island, including absentees. That’s the same number of documented voters on the manifest maintained by Singo on Election Day. But after the new ballots were discovered on recount day, 192 total ballots were counted.

Put simply: There are 21 more ballots from Long Island than there are documented voters.

Efforts by the Bangor Daily News to obtain a copy of the voter manifest have so far been unsuccessful. However, Marc Malon, Senate caucus director for the Maine Democratic Party, and Bill Logan, a lawyer representing the GOP, both reviewed the voter manifest on Monday and confirmed in separate interviews that the 21 additional ballots could not be accounted for.

Singo, the town clerk and lone election warden in Long Island, said Tuesday that she did not know how there could be more ballots than voters, and that she had never heard of this situation ever happening before.

She said she was uncomfortable answering further questions until she spoke with the secretary of state.

The recount and document review was overseen by Deputy Secretary of State Julie Flynn. Efforts this week to contact Flynn and Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap have been unsuccessful.

Given the tight margin in the recount, these 21 untraceable ballots made the difference in deciding the winner after the recount. On the night of the recount, the attorney representing the Democrats, Kate Knox, refused to accept the new results, citing concerns with Long Island’s ballots as well as 10 missing ballots from Gray and Westbrook.

However, Logan would not agree to any additional recounts, and Flynn made the decision to declare the recount finished. That effectively punted the issue to the Senate, where incoming Senate President Michael Thibodeau, a Republican, will appoint a committee of seven senators — four Republicans and three Democrats — to decide which candidate will be seated.

Democrats feel burned by the fact that the GOP would not allow any additional investigation, and say the senators must use all resources at their disposal to determine where the 21 Long Island ballots came from, and pledge to explore all legal options available to ensure there was no voter fraud in Senate District 25.

“The worst-case scenario is that extra ballots were somehow put into that count that were not real ballots, that someone ‘stuffed the ballot box,’” Knox said. “I’m not saying that happened, but when you add up all the facts, it doesn’t add up.”

Logan, the GOP attorney present for the recount and voter manifest review, said that it’s not unusual for vote totals to sway during a recount, and that there are always unanswered — and unanswerable — questions about why or how the figures change.

“One could always theorize that something nefarious was done, or that some mistake was made, but it’s just a theory,” he said Monday. “We counted every ballot that we had, counted by a Republican and a Democrat, and the ballots were confirmed by the secretary of state. I can understand why they may be disappointed by the result, but that’s part of a close election.”

Logan said the explanation could be as simple as the warden failing to check the names of voters who cast ballots on Election Day. Long Island is the only town in Senate District 25 where ballots are counted by hand on election night, he added, so human tabulation error is not out of the question, either.

Knox said either of those could be plausible explanations for a discrepancy of one or two ballots, but not 11 percent of all the votes cast in the town.

She also contested the idea that Democrats were only concerned because their candidate lost after the recount.

“We’re definitely in an era of skepticism, and people are not fans of partisan bickering. And I do understand that,” she said. “But objectively, when you’re in a situation where you have serious questions about ballots when the race is this close, and those questions can sway the race, I’d hope people would say there’s a responsibility for everybody to at least ascertain the accurate count.”

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