Former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson has taken an early lead in the race to secure delegates for the snap Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.

On Saturday, Maine Democrats began picking 500 delegates to the July 25 convention where the party will choose a replacement for Graham Platner, who left the race less than two weeks ago after being accused of sexual assault. (He denies the allegation.)

Of the 170 delegates elected in seven counties by Saturday evening, 48, or nearly 28%, had publicly disclosed their support Jackson ahead of this weekend’s vote. One delegate elected said they intended to support Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

The rest of the delegates elected Saturday in Hancock, Penobscot, Kennebec, Androscoggin, Franklin, Lincoln and Washington counties did not disclose a preferred Senate candidate before the weekend vote.

However, Jackson claims his support is much stronger than the public statements from the potential delegates indicate: On social media, Jackson told his supporters that he swept the delegates in Penobscot (44) and Kennebec (40) counties, while netting 22 of the 23 chosen delegates in Hancock County — where Platner is from.

While Jackson’s support appears strong, the delegates elected this weekend are not legally bound to support a specific candidate,who may be chosen through several rounds of voting. And they’re only a fraction of the 601-member body that will selected a new candidate.

Eight counties, including Cumberland, were slated to elect delegates on Saturday, while the remaining eight counties planned to do so on Sunday.

The biggest prize is Cumberland County, which will send 149 delegates to the convention. Online voting there began at 4 p.m. and was expected to remain open for at least three hours.

The unique — and at times, bizarre — spectacle played out all over the state on Saturday: attendees in Hancock County squinted at their phones in a middle school gym to try to review information about potential delegates. In Kennebec, potential delegates rubbed elbows with candidates. In the state’s larger counties, voters met over Zoom to make their picks.

All the while, candidates in the dozen-strong Democratic field hoping to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins tried to stack the nominating convention with loyalists.

In the days leading up to the delegate nominating meetings, Jackson, Bellows and former director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Nirav Shah released the names of delegates they say will be loyal to them at the convention. The candidates urged supporters to vote only for the potential delegates who appeared on their lists.

Jackson served as Senate president for eight years and has strong union support. He also campaigned with Platner. Both were endorsed by progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT.

It’s not clear that the candidates’ released lists of loyal delegates were totally accurate. On Saturday, numerous cases emerged of potential delegates getting listed on slates for multiple candidates.

The Waldo County Democratic Committee warned its followers on social media that “many” of the delegate candidates listed on multiple slates said the campaigns had not asked them if they wanted to be listed.

A similar warning was issued by the York County Democratic Committee, which will select 84 delegates — the second largest slate behind Cumberland. The committee urged voters to let the aspiring delegates speak for themselves, saying “every York County Candidate deserves to have their statement read by our participants.”

The unusual process to pick delegates to the convention — which will have 601 delegates in all because the Democrats’ 101 state committee members will also vote — came as a result of Platner ending his campaign to unseat Collins earlier this month in one of the most extraordinary political developments in Maine history.

Platner dropped out of one of the nation’s most-watched races for Senate a few days after Politico published a story detailing a former girlfriend’s claim that Platner sexually assaulted her in 2021.

Platner denied the accusation, but state and national Democrats who had supported him through his other controversies swiftly called on him to end his campaign.

Joseph Zamboni, chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, kicked off the county’s virtual meeting by acknowledging the vote as “a very extraordinary moment.”

But nowhere did Platner, a 41-year-old oysterman and military veteran, loom larger than his home county of Hancock, where attendees met for several hours on Saturday.

Some participants in the county meeting stopped by a table with large pieces of paper to write notes to Platner and his wife, Amy Gertner.

“Thanks for getting people to believe again,” one note said.

Candidates are trying to harness the grassroots energy that Platner created in the race to unseat Collins.

“This is Graham Platner’s home county, right? Almost everyone in that room knows Graham Platner and cared a lot about his campaign,” state Rep. Nina Milliken, D-Blue Hill, a Jackson campaign volunteer, said after the county results were read aloud to a largely empty Ellsworth Elementary Middle School gym.

Milliken noted that Platner named Jackson as his top pick for governor in the June primary that saw Jackson finish third behind Shah and the gubernatorial nominee, former Maine House Speaker Hannah Pingree.

Jackson is one of a few contenders for Senate that seem to be separating themselves from the pack.

In statements that each delegate candidate submitted ahead of the weekend, Jackson was mentioned the most, with Shah in second.

But those mentions from a few hundred hopefuls represented only a sliver of the nearly 4,000 Democrats vying to be delegates.

In Kennebec County, several of the contenders appeared to hobnob with potential delegates. Jackson, Shah, Bellows, former congressional aide Jordan Wood, Maine Beer Co. co-founder Dan Kleban and Brunswick Democrat David Costello — as well as political newcomers Elizabeth Coté and Saundra Pelletier — were among those making appearances at the Augusta Civic Center.

“I’d like to win, but, you know, getting a chance to talk to people like this is really, really nice,” said Jackson.

Bellows, a Manchester resident who lost handily to Collins as the Democratic Senate nominee in 2014, credited Platner for showing Democrats that “you have to be authentic” in order to beat the five-term Republican incumbent.

“The politics of the past is pretending to be a savior who is going to sweep in and save the people,” Bellows said before the Kennebec County voting had begun Saturday. “The politics of the future is that the people will save democracy in our country, but only if the politicians don’t try to control them.”