Voters fill out ballots on Election Day at the Mount Vernon Community Center in Mount Vernon. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

A record number of Maine voters cast ballots in the 2024 election, likely fueled by a high-stakes presidential race and reflecting strong voter turnout levels across the country this year.

A total of 842,447 people voted in both the presidential and U.S. Senate races in Maine, according to election results from the Maine Department of the Secretary of State.

It’s too early to say what official turnout is because the department doesn’t yet have all the numbers from clerks in terms of voter participation history and voter registrations, said Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. Official turnout will be reported this winter, but the number of ballots cast is higher than in past elections.

“We saw huge voter turnout in 2020 and again in 2022,” Bellows said. “Based on the numbers from 2024, it seems like it was another huge year because more Mainers voted than ever before in our history.”

In 2022, 680,909 Maine voters cast ballots, and in the last presidential race in 2020, 822,534 Maine voters cast ballots, according to the United States Election Assistance Commission, which collects election data from states and calculates turnout rates.

Maine had the highest voter turnout in the country in 2022, both among active registered voters (73.3%) and the population of citizens of voting age (61.8%).

“Maine should be really proud because we’re consistently at the top of the nation in voter participation,” Bellows said. “And based on the number of voters who turned out this year, I think 2024 was another banner year.”

Across the country, this year’s election turnout appeared to rival the historic levels seen in 2020. That year saw the highest election turnout since women were given the right to vote more than a century ago, The Associated Press reported.

More than 153 million ballots were cast in this year’s presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, with the total expected to come closer to the 158 million seen in 2020 after all ballots are finally tallied, the AP said this month.

Massachusetts saw its second-highest number of ballots ever cast, with 3.5 million people participating in the Nov. 5 election. Nearly 3.7 million ballots were cast in Massachusetts in 2020, according to the Massachusetts secretary of state.

New Hampshire Public Radio reported that the 834,651 ballots cast in that state exceeded the previous record by more than 20,000 ballots.

Maine had 955,285 active registered voters as of June, which would put the turnout rate for the November election at 88% of registered voters. But the number of registered voters is expected to have grown, since the state also saw a significant number of new registrations both online and in person, Bellows said.

This was the first year for Maine’s online voter registration system, but Bellows said clerks still saw “huge” numbers of people filling out same-day voter registrations at the polls.

“Presidential races always draw turnout, so we would always expect to see high turnout in a presidential year,” Bellows said.