The top first-choice vote-getters did not prevail in two of this month’s three major Maine primary elections that required automatic ranked-choice runoffs. In a third race, six candidates had to be eliminated before the winner emerged.

That’s because Maine’s ranked-choice voting system requires a victorious candidate to receive votes from a majority of ballots cast. The process, meant to reward candidates with broad appeal, arrived at Hannah Pingree as the Democratic nominee for governor, Bobby Charles as the Republican nominee for governor and Matt Dunlap as the Democratic standard-bearer in the 2nd Congressional District.

After five days and one very late night of compiling Mainers’ votes in Augusta, state election officials conducted the ranked-choice runoffs in an instant electronically. The following diagrams slow down the calculation, showing how ballots flowed through the process.

Governor — Democrats

In both Democratic ranked-choice races, the candidates in the lead among first-choice votes were overpowered by rivals aligned with other candidates seen as more progressive.

In the gubernatorial primary, Pingree, a former speaker of the Maine House of Representatives and daughter of U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, picked up the most votes from every eliminated contender. She was the next choice of supporters of candidates across the ideological spectrum, from the centrist businessman Angus King III to the Bernie Sanders-endorsed former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson.

Pingree received a third-place vote from Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner and an endorsement from her former boss, Gov. Janet Mills, who had campaigned against Platner for several months.

Pingree’s large coalition outdid public health official Nirav Shah, who parlayed his COVID-19 response in Maine into an energetic campaign, but had a far shorter background in the state.

Governor — Republicans

Charles, a onetime federal official and strong supporter of President Donald Trump, took a very different path to victory in his party’s ranked-choice tabulation, holding onto his substantial initial lead over the rest of the crowded Republican field.

In none of the rounds was he the biggest beneficiary of reapportioned ballots — a distinction most often held by the second-place finisher, the fitness executive Ben Midgley — but Charles still managed to inch his way to a majority.

Compared to the Democratic race, fewer ballots were reapportioned at all, since many Republican primary voters did not rank as many of their options. For instance, most ballots held by Jonathan Bush in the penultimate round went neither to Charles nor to Midgley, meaning that Bush was those voters’ lowest and, in some cases, only choice.

The pattern could indicate limited enthusiasm for Charles, who was a target of particular criticism from his Republican opponents, or Republican voters’ relative aversion to ranked-choice voting.

(During the last day of accounting for votes in the ranked-choice runoffs, Charles criticized the election process and vowed to change it if elected governor.)

U.S. House — Democrats

Dunlap, the progressive state auditor, triumphed after Jordan Wood’s first-round ballots substantially favored Dunlap over State Sen. Joe Baldacci. Baldacci, a moderate, was the second Democratic candidate supported by national Democratic leaders to lose a primary in Maine, after Mills.

Baldacci retained a narrow edge after ballots moved on from social worker Paige Loud. And Dunlap himself was almost eliminated after the second round, but he held a few hundred more votes than Wood. Then, in the final round, Wood’s supporters ranked Dunlap in much larger numbers than they ranked Baldacci.

The result, unlike the governor’s race, marked a clear ranked-choice boost for Platner, who shared a stage in Bar Harbor with Jackson and Dunlap days before the primary election. Dunlap now faces former Gov. Paul LePage, who won the Republican nomination without a contested primary, let alone a ranked-choice runoff.