Just before the 2024 presidential election, Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Trump-hating secretary of state, shrugged off concerns about noncitizens casting ballots as a ploy by Republicans to “decrease trust in our elections and lay the groundwork to challenge results if they don’t win.” 

Last year, the Democrat dismissed a conservative news outlet’s report that at least five foreign nationals have voted in Maine’s elections over the past eight years. She has suggested that the state’s safeguards keep noncitizens from voting. 

But recently Bellows begrudgingly acknowledged that there are “some” noncitizens on the Pine Tree State’s registered voter list. 

“I’m sure there are, um, in some isolated instances, some noncitizens may be on the rolls,” the elections official said in a video clip posted last week on the Maine Wire’s Facebook page. The conservative news outlet did not note when Bellows made the comments. 

Conservative social media account Libs of TikTok picked up and pushed out the clip to a wider audience.

Just how many noncitizens are on Maine’s voter rolls? How much is “some?” That’s unclear. Bellows’ spokeswoman did not return The Federalist’s request for comment. 

The Daily Signal on Thursday reported on the GOP’s response to Bellows interesting admission. 

“Shenna Bellows fully admitted that non-citizens are registered to vote in Maine’s elections, and yet she refuses to clean up the voter rolls,” Republican National Committee press secretary Kiersten Pels told The Daily Signal. “Bellows is undermining Maine voters with her lack of transparency and blatant disregard for the law.”

Secretary Hypocrite 

The highly partisan secretary of state, who in late 2023 unconstitutionally removed then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump from Maine’s primary ballot, recently told the Trump administration officials to go jump in a gulf after the U.S. Department of Justice requested Maine voter data. 

This summer, the DOJ Civil Rights Division has asked several states, including Maine, to provide information on their election processes and voter registration data. Bellows, who has parlayed her activist brand of Trump Derangement Syndrome into a run for governor, shook her fist. The election official said the DOJ’s request was unconstitutional, the height of hypocrisy after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down efforts like Bellows’ to disqualify Trump from the 2024 primary ballot on a politically twisted reading of the Constitution. 

Bellows attacked the DOJ’s motives, reading from the Democratic Party’s political talking points and suggesting that the Trump administration is, you guessed it, trying to “undermine voter confidence in our strong elections system.”

“My answer to the DOJ is, ‘Go jump in the Gulf of Maine,’” Bellows told the leftist Maine Morning Star in late July.  

Transparency Victory 

Election-integrity watchdogs have long been concerned about the state of Maine’s voter rolls and a lack of transparency in the secretary of state’s office. 

In July, the Public Interest Legal Foundation informed Bellows that it had found more than 18,000 deceased residents, almost 1,500 same address duplicate or triplicate registrations, and 900-plus registrants registered in other states on Maine’s voter list. 

In early 2024, the foundation won a landmark victory “for transparency and clean elections” when the First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Maine’s voter rolls are bound by public records provisions under the National Voter Registration Act. 

“Whether voter registration rolls are accurate and current cannot be determined without inspecting the Voter File … In other words, the evaluation of voter registration rolls would be impossible if the results of Maine’s voter list registration and maintenance activities were not subject to public disclosure,” the federal court opinion states. 

The Foundation challenged the state’s “Use Ban” law,  which prevented government watchdogs from comparing Maine’s voter files to other states’ lists, for instance. “Violators” risked severe fines for “unauthorized use.” 

“During litigation, PILF also discovered the bill in question was drafted by Maine Secretary of State staffers, sympathetic legislators, and the top lobbyist for the state Democratic Party,” the foundation stated in a press release. “Also involved in the drafting was the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), an organization that waged a legal campaign against the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017 to block access to states’ voter files for interstate research comparisons.”

‘Reckless Partisanship’

It comes as no surprise that Bellows railed against the Republican-led U.S. House’s passage this year of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship upon registering to vote. The Democrat repeated her party’s faulty objections to the election-integrity measure, insisting that the current system of registrants attesting to their U.S. citizenship without physically proving it is good enough. Democrats have stalled the bill in the Senate. 

Maine is one of 14 states and the District of Columbia that doesn’t require any documentation to vote at the polls, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Maine Republicans did not return The Federalist’s request for comment, but the Republican National Committee’s Rapid Response team issued a statement blasting Bellows for her lack of action in cleaning up the voter files.  

“Bellows’ failure to act and her reckless partisanship shows she’s more interested in attacking President Trump than protecting Maine’s elections,” the GOP said. “Bellows is running for Governor, but how can Mainers trust her to run their state when she can’t even be trusted to safeguard their elections?”