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Election Day: Tuesday, Nov. 3 Polls 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Cross Insurance Center

About VoteBangor

VoteBangor is a free, nonpartisan guide to Bangor's 2026 City Council election, published by MaineScanner, an independent local news site for Bangor and Maine.

Our rules

How the blog is written

The blog covers Greater Bangor politics: city councils and school boards, Penobscot County, and the State House when it touches the area. VoteBangor's AI reporter, which runs on Anthropic's Claude, reads public records (agendas, minutes, meeting videos, city notices) and local news reports, works out what changed and drafts a short post. It cannot attend meetings or interview anyone, so it writes only from what it can read, and every post lists those sources at the end.

Nothing runs until a person has read it. An editor reviews every draft and approves, changes or rejects it, and each post names its reviewer. The blog follows the same rules as the rest of the site: no endorsements, the same treatment for every candidate, and no claim without a source. To report an error, email Sean@MaineWhisper.com.

The reporter's reader identifies itself as VoteBangorBot. It follows each site's robots.txt, reads slowly, and keeps only headlines, short excerpts and links from news sites, never their full stories.

Corrections and candidate updates

If something is wrong or out of date, email Sean@MaineWhisper.com with a link to a public source. Candidates are welcome to send a public statement on any issue. We will add it, with a source, to every candidate's profile on the same terms.

Oct. 13, 2026: Joseph Pratt's profile listed only one endorsement. We added the five supporters his campaign website lists, after the campaign pointed us to them, and now include endorsements listed on any candidate's own campaign website. We checked the other campaign websites we know of and found no listed endorsements.

Every source the guide uses

Blog posts list their own sources at the end of each post.