Maine

The state's enrollment file carries 504 places against 484 organized municipalities in the Census, and the gap includes 18 unorganized townships holding 2,435 active registrations. These have no selectmen, no town meeting and no clerk of their own; the county and the state administer them. A schema that makes municipality a required attribute of a voter has 2,435 records with nothing valid to write, and a join from the voter file to a municipal government table drops them silently.

The Secretary of State warns explicitly that unenrolled candidates may designate themselves Independent while no Independent party exists in Maine. So the ballot label and the enrollment value disagree by design: a candidate reads Independent, the register reads Unenrolled, and neither is a party. Any pipeline that derives a candidate's party from the ballot label creates a Maine Independent Party, and any pipeline that reconciles candidate party against voter enrollment finds a value it cannot match.

The Green Independent Party has 30,687 active registrations, its own column in the state's enrollment file alongside Democratic and Republican, and reaches 6.68% in Brownfield. Most of this corpus publishes two party columns and an other; Maine publishes four parties and an unenrolled. A two-party schema with an other bucket loses a ballot-qualified organisation with thirty thousand members, and a fixed major-minor split puts it on the wrong side.

The state uses ranked-choice voting in primaries and in general elections for federal offices only, so a single November ballot carries federal contests decided by ranking and state contests decided by plurality. A results parser that applies one tabulation model to the ballot mis-reads one half or the other, and the distinction is stated in guidance rather than being visible in the shape of the results file. Alaska draws the same kind of line in a different place, exempting retentions and measures instead.

The Census counts 31 plantations in Maine as general-purpose governments alongside 430 towns and 23 cities. The word appears essentially nowhere else in American local government, and it is neither a town nor a township nor a village in the sense any other state means. A tier vocabulary built from the other 49 states has no entry for it, and mapping it to township by analogy is a guess rather than a reading.

The file has one row per ward or precinct within a municipality, with congressional, state senate, state representative and county commissioner districts on every row — 741 rows for 504 places. A municipality's total exists only as a sum, and the same municipality appears many times with different district values because ward boundaries split it across districts. Reading it as one row per place gives a partial figure for every split municipality and a wrong statewide total.

Maine issues the enrollment data as two workbooks with identical layouts — one for active registrations and one for inactive — rather than as a status column in one table. 897,677 active and 135,769 inactive, and nothing in either file names the other. A consumer that finds one file and not the other reports a statewide register that is either 13% short or 13% of the truth, and both numbers look plausible in isolation.

Maine administers 16 counties and the Census counts 16 county governments. In this family that makes it the conservative case: Connecticut and Rhode Island have zero, Massachusetts retains 5 of 14, and Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire keep all of theirs. A New England pipeline written against Massachusetts or Connecticut will assume the county tier is absent or vestigial, and in Maine it is neither — the county administers the unorganized territory that the towns do not cover.