Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has refused a request from the Trump Administration to turn over the state’s voter rolls, telling the Department of Justice (DOJ) to “go jump in the Gulf of Maine.”
Earlier this month, this DOJ began asking states to turn over voter registration information, and Maine was among the states to most recently receive such a request.
Maine Morning Star reported that Secretary Bellows had said the National Association of Secretaries of State indicated that the DOJ was eventually planning to ask for voter registration files from all fifty states.
According to the Portland Press Herald, a letter sent to the Maine Secretary of State late last week and signed by Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General Michael Gates suggested that Maine has 11,000 duplicate voter registrations.
In asking for the state’s complete voter registration list dating back to November 2022, the DOJ said that they want “to ensure that ineligible voters are being removed.”
“Please provide a description of the steps that Maine has taken, and when those steps were taken, to identify registered voters who are ineligible to vote as well as the procedures it used to remove those ineligible voters from the registration list,” the DOJ’s letter reportedly said.
“The Gulf of Maine is awfully cold, but maybe that’s what the DOJ needs to cool down,” Secretary Bellows, who is also running for governor in 2026, said in response to the Trump Administration’s request. “So, here’s my answer to Trump’s DOJ today: go jump in the Gulf of Maine.”
“Article 1 of the Constitution places the states — not President Trump, not the federal government — in charge of federal elections,” Bellows said, according to the Portland Press Herald.
“I believe strongly in voter privacy,” she added in her official statement, “and I feel strongly that the federal government has overstepped its bounds with this request.”
“Mainers should be very proud of our high voter participation – we have free, safe, and secure elections,” Bellows said. “We owe a thank you to our hardworking state and local election officials who make it happen.”
“The DOJ should be ashamed of themselves for casting any aspersion on Maine clerks and civil service elections officials,” she said. “They have no right to the sensitive, personal information of every voter in the State of Maine. We will be telling them that in the days to come.”
The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ has reportedly asked the state to share its complete voter registration list, the names of officials who handle the list’s maintenance, and the number of ineligible voters the state identified due to noncitizenship, as well as other information about the state’s election processes.
The Secretary of State’s Office is expected to issue a formal letter of response to the DOJ in the coming days. The Portland Press Herald reported that Bellows will be coordinating with the Maine Attorney Generals Office to produce this response.
