Maine hasn’t had many ballottampering controversies, but it looks like the state Senate will open its session with a doozy.

A tight race for a District 25 open seat saw Democrat Catherine Breen leading by just 32 votes. After a recount, Republican Cathleen Manchester was declared the winner by 11 votes.

But there was a problem. On Long Island, a town that broke away from Portland in the 1980s, the town clerk tabulated 171 votes on election night — from 238 registered voters. When the ballot box was unsealed for the recount, there were 192 ballots in the box.

According to a Democratic poll watcher, the “new,” or “phantom” ballots were all at the top, and appeared to be folded differently. All 21 ballots were marked for Manchester, which effectively handed her the election.

How did the ballots get into the box? That’s now the province of the Senate, since the Secretary of State’s office, perhaps unwisely, decided not to review the Long Island ballots and declared the recount closed.

Ballot tampering was a common practice in the 19th and even the 20th century. The most infamous case is the 1948 U.S. Senate election in Texas, where Lyndon Johnson, then known as “Landslide Lyndon,” defeated arch-conservative former governor Coke Stevenson by 87 votes. Texas, then a one-party Democratic state, decided all races in the primaries.

Johnson was accused of stealing the election, particularly after a “missing” ballot box was found containing 203 ballots — all but one for Johnson.

What isn’t often mentioned is that Johnson, in all probability, had a 1941 special Senate election stolen from him by Stevenson forces; his backers may have returned the favor.

In any case, as Johnson’s mentor, Alvin Wirtz, once said, “No Texas election was over until the last crooks finished changing the votes in their counties.”

But that was Texas. This is Maine — a whole lot cleaner. But not entirely.

Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, commenting on the Long Island count, said, “This type of discrepancy has not occurred in recent memory.” But how do you define “recent”?

Many Mainers still remember the ballot-tampering case in 1991 that ultimately felled House Speaker John Martin, a Democrat who served 19 years and accumulated more power than any other legislator, before or since.

The scandal started with the apparent election of Republican Sumner Lipman, a prominent Augusta attorney, who won a House seat then occupied by Democrat Dan Hickey. Martin apparently worried about Lipman’s ambitions and wanted to keep him out; Lipman did subsequently run for governor, finishing second to Susan Collins in the 1994 GOP primary.

Using convoluted reasoning, House Democrats ordered a new election. Lipman won by a wider margin. But things turned scandalous when it was discovered someone had broken into the State House room where ballots awaiting recount were stored. That someone was Ken Allen, Martin’s top aide, who was convicted and served time.

Martin’s involvement was never proved, but most found it impossible to believe he had nothing to do with the tampering. It was all downhill from there, included overwhelming endorsement by voters, in 1993, of legislative term limits intended, in large part, to prevent Martin from remaining speaker. And while Martin himself keeps returning — the term limits law isn’t that tight — the Democratic brand was badly damaged.

So what’s the situation now? It doesn’t look good.

Republican lawyer Bill Logan argues this is just one of those things and says that, now that the Long Island ballots have been intermingled, it will be difficult to separate suspect ones. It was Logan who opposed a request by Democratic counterpart, Kathy Knox, for a second look.

The idea these are all legitimate votes is highly implausible. The simplest comparison is what happened on election night.

In unofficial returns, Breen carried the town 95-65. The 21 all-Manchester ballots made the margin 95- 86.

That doesn’t match other Long Island voting. The local House race saw the Democrat favored 91-69. Mike Michaud bested Paul LePage by 79-63, with the balance to Eliot Cutler. Is it really believable Long Island split tickets just for the Senate race?

The Republican Party, in Maine and the nation, has declared that voter fraud is a huge problem requiring all sorts of restrictions before voters get to the polls. They’ll be judged now on how they handle a highly visible post-election issue.

John Martin had little to gain and much to lose when he maneuvered to thwart a potential rival. The four Senate Republicans who will control the elections panel reviewing the District 25 vote might want to keep that in mind.

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Douglas Rooks is a former daily and weekly newspaper editor who has covered the State House for 30 years. He can be reached at [email protected].