High winds knocked out power to a total of more than 57,000 Central Maine Power Co. customers on Election Day, as well as several hundred Versant Power customers.

Crews worked quickly to restore power as winds died down in the early evening Tuesday. Central Maine Power reported as many as 28,000 customers without power around 3:30 p.m., but that number was nearly cut in half, to about 15,000 customers, at 5:30 p.m.

As of 8 p.m., nearly 11,800 CMP customers were still without power.

More than 4,300 of those without power early Tuesday evening were in York County, with an additional 5,100 in Cumberland County, 2,000 in Oxford County, over 1,700 in Androscoggin County and more than 1,000 in Franklin County.

Over 500 Versant Power customers were without power as of 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, but that dropped to about 300 customers by 4:45 p.m. and 100 by 5:30 p.m. Less than 30 remained powerless as of 8 p.m.

Wind gusts of up to 54 mph were recorded in Portland, 51 mph in Sanford, 49 mph in Fryeburg and 48 mph in Rockland, according to the National Weather Service office in Gray.

Outages fluctuated throughout the day. Early Tuesday afternoon, CMP reported over 5,000 outages in Cumberland County, but that had dropped to about 4,800 by 2:30 p.m. Less than an hour later, though, it increased to nearly 8,000, before dropping back down to around 5,000 in the early evening.

Meanwhile, more than 25,000 CMP customers who had lost power earlier in the day had it restored by about 3:30 p.m., according to spokesperson Dustin Wlodkowski.

CMP also staged crews near polling locations, Wlodkowski said, to ensure swift restoration in the event of an outage while voting was taking place.

Voting was expected to continue uninterrupted even if polling places experienced outages, according to Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

“Maine uses paper ballots, and even in larger locations that use tabulators, any ballots that might not be able to be immediately fed into a tabulator will be held in a secure auxiliary box to be counted,” Bellows said in a written statement Tuesday afternoon. “The Elections Division is working closely with Versant and CMP to monitor outages impacting polling locations.”

Wlodkowski said 7,600 people in the Lisbon Falls area had power knocked out by a fallen tree, but it was restored in less than five minutes thanks to new technology that detects an outage and reroutes power throughout the CMP system.

Many fire departments across the state announced they were responding to reports of downed trees and wires Tuesday. The Kennebunk Fire & Rescue Department was assisting Sanford with a brush fire caused by fallen power lines, the department said in a social media post. The post noted that multiple brush fires were reported throughout York County.

A tree fell and blocked the entirety of South Street near Dearborn Avenue in Biddeford on Tuesday evening, the city’s police department said in a social media post, and drivers were being diverted. The Sebago Fire Department announced multiple road closures in their town because of downed trees and wires as well.

CMP posted an alert at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, announcing that high winds would likely cause outages and that extra crews had been deployed across the state. It also noted that crews cannot go up in bucket trucks to repair lines when winds exceed 30 mph.