SKOWHEGAN — The unofficial tally Wednesday was close, but it appears that Somerset County voters rejected a proposal to change the county’s register of deeds from an elected position to an appointed one for the third year in a row.

Unofficial results compiled Wednesday by the Morning Sentinel show that about 53% of approximately 13,300 Somerset County voters who cast ballots in the referendum Tuesday rejected the change.

County Administrator Tim Curtis, who also compiled results from municipal clerks Wednesday, said it was likely the “No” vote would prevail, with only a handful of smaller towns and plantations making up a few hundred of the county’s registered voters missing from his list.

In county elections, the Maine Department of the Secretary of State tabulates the official results from each municipality. That process is expected to be completed by the end of the month.

Somerset County officials were hoping they could sway voters this year, after similar proposals failed in 2023 and 2024.

They argued that letting the Board of Commissioners appoint the register of deeds, rather than letting people elect someone to the post, would help retain a qualified person in the position, which has evolved along with advances in technology. 

The register of deeds is responsible for recording and maintaining a variety of real estate documents, such as property transfers, mortgages and liens, housed in Skowhegan.

The position is one of several county-level offices in Maine that tend not to grab headlines or foster hotly contested elections. State statute dictates that voters in Maine’s 16 counties elect their respective register of deeds, but Androscoggin, Cumberland and Knox counties have changed their respective charters to make the position appointed.

In recent years, Somerset County officials said they have found it challenging to find someone who has both the needed skills for the job and the political will to qualify for the ballot.

The current register of deeds, Tanya Belanger, is serving a partial two-year term set to end in 2026. Belanger ran in November 2024 as a write-in candidate. Nobody qualified for the ballot in that election.

The county commissioners hired Belanger in late 2023 as the registry of deeds’ office manager, amid several years of turnover in the register position.

In 2015, then-Register of Deeds Diane Godin, who had held the office since 2001, left the position amid a series of escalating conflicts with fellow county officials.

Laura Price, a longtime deputy register who had run against Godin in 2014, was appointed acting register of deeds to fill the vacancy. Price was elected to the post in 2018, and then ran again as a write-in candidate in 2022.

Price had been planning to leave the post and only ran in 2022 because nobody else submitted nomination papers to appear on the ballot, Curtis said previously.

Price resigned in June 2023, just a few months into a four-year term ending in 2026. That led to the July 2023 appointment of Erica Rowe, who had previously been a clerk in the office. Rowe’s appointment was made via a caucus of municipal officials, a process dictated by the Somerset County charter.

Meeting minutes show she was offered a contract the next month, following an executive session of the Board of Commissioners.

In September 2023, Rowe resigned, leaving the register of deeds position vacant once again.

That led to the first attempt by the county commissioners to change the position to an appointed one through a ballot question.

When that failed, the county hired Belanger to keep the Registry of Deeds running until the November 2024 election. Deputy Register Arlene Demo, who has decades of experience in the office, was sworn in as acting register, and served in that capacity until Belanger’s election last year.

Belanger now holds a bifurcated position: the office manager role is full-time, while the register of deeds position is simply to meet statutory requirements of the elected office and comes with an annual $5,000 stipend.

State law says nothing about how much the register of deeds must work. It spells out only the position’s official responsibilities. The split position means if another person wins in 2026, Belanger could theoretically keep her full-time job as office manager, although she said that would not be ideal.

Belanger, of Bingham, took a more public stance in this year’s referendum than in 2024, urging voters to trust officials that the proposal was best for the county. She has not yet said whether she intends to run for reelection in 2026.