Questions Mount Around Maine Absentee Ballot System After Thousands of Duplicate Records and Accepted Ballots Vanish During State Outage Just Days before Primary

On the morning of Tuesday, June 2 — exactly one week before the June 9 primary, and with in-person absentee voting underway across the state — Maine’s Central Voter Registry experienced an unannounced and surprise update. In several towns, the work spilled into the start of the voting day.

In Scarborough, three voters who arrived when Town Hall opened at 7 a.m. were told they could wait or come back later, according to media reports on the disruption. The clerk there did not get a workaround from the state until after the Secretary of State’s office opened at 8 a.m., and in the meantime recorded who had voted by hand, with the intention of entering it into the system after the fact. Gorham clerks ran into the same problem.

The Secretary of State’s office acknowledged the issue the same day — but only in a brief statement to a single broadcast outlet. Deputy Secretary of State for Communications Jana Spaulding told a liberal TV news outlet that an update was being applied to the CVR system, “resulting in a short delay” in clerks’ ability to update a ballot’s status, but that clerks could still issue and collect ballots and that no voters should be turned away. The state characterized the episode as brief, and absentee voting continued.

That is, to date, the full extent of the public explanation. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has apparently been too busy campaigning in the very election she’s administering to properly explain the unprecedented and unannounced glitch in Maine’s early voting system.

There was no press release. Nor has the Secretary of State’s office responded to a series of questions submitted to Bellows’ various taxpayer-funded communications professionals.

The Maine Wire reviewed the Secretary of State’s official news page; it carries no notice — on June 2 or June 3 — that the voter registry was being taken down, updated, or otherwise interrupted. The office’s only posting that week about the election was a routine “Primary Election one week away” advisory on June 2 that made no mention of the system work. The next item, dated June 3, concerns an unrelated sheriff’s petition hearing.

It’s almost like the Secretary of State would prefer no one know that a massive alteration had been made to the CVR system that underpins Maine’s elections.

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One week out from a statewide primary, the state modified the live database that every town clerk in Maine relies on to check in voters and record absentee ballots — and the public learned of it only because reporters happened to ask after clerks in a couple of towns couldn’t log voters in… and a few more technically minded readers of The Maine Wire sent along their analyses of what was happening with the websites as the alleged upgrades unfolded.

Who made the decision to try to pull this one over on the voters of Maine?

Had Bellows proven herself a non-partisan and competent Secretary of State, she might have earned the benefit of the doubt here. But this is an official who attempted to illegally remove President Donald Trump from Maine’s 2024 presidential ballots — the same official who still can’t explain how 250 Maine absentee ballots turned up in an Amazon Prime package last year. For some strange reason, election irregularities seem to follow Bellows wherever she goes.

The publicly confirmed details about the CVR system changes raise a series of questions the Secretary of State has not answered — but should:

What, exactly, was changed? The state has said only that an “update” was “applied” to the CVR. It has not described what the update did, what problem it was meant to fix, or what parts of the system it touched. Why was the update made? Was it a response to a threat? Why wasn’t more warning given?

Was it scheduled — and if so, by whom, and when? A planned maintenance window during an active election would normally come with advance notice to the clerks who depend on the system. An unplanned change applied on a Tuesday morning during voting would raise a different set of questions. The office has not said which this was.

Why were clerks caught flat-footed? The reporting describes clerks in at least two municipalities improvising at the counter while they waited for guidance that did not arrive until the state office opened. If the update was routine and planned, why were front-line election officials apparently not told how to work around it before voters started showing up at 7 a.m.?

Was the system tested before it went live during voting? Election administrators in other states stage and test changes to voter databases before deploying them, precisely to avoid disruptions during active voting. The Secretary of State has not addressed whether this update was staged or tested.

And the question the office has pointedly not invited: was there any external cause?

No official has alleged — and The Maine Wire has found no evidence of — a cyberattack, breach, or security vulnerability. The only cause the state has offered is a “system update.” But because the office has explained so little, and because Bellows is so utterly lacking in candor and integrity, it has left the public to take that single word on faith during the most sensitive stretch of the election calendar.

The timing has also drawn outside scrutiny.

A data analysis obtained by The Maine Wire (and corroborated) compares the state’s published daily absentee files from June 1 and June 2 and flags anomalies in the June 2 file, including thousands of exact-duplicate rows that the analysis says were absent from neighboring days’ files. That document, by its own terms, “makes no claim of intent or wrongdoing” and asks only for an explanation and verification.

The discrepancy in the data files published by the Secretary of State’s office in and around the timing of the CVR system changes is likely totally benign. But it nonetheless demands an explanation.

The Maine Wire has submitted the following questions to the Secretary of State’s office as well as a Freedom of Access Act request for the change logs related to the system overhaul. This story will be updated when/if there is a response.

1. What precisely was the June 2 update — vendor patch, schema migration, full resync? Was it scheduled, and why during early voting rather than after June 4?

2. Are the daily absentee files generated by an export query against the live CVR, and was any export run while the update was in progress?

3. Does the official ballot count derive from these published files in any way, or solely from municipal clerk tabulation of physical ballots?

4. Can the office confirm on the record that no ballot’s status (accepted/rejected) was altered by the update?

5. Why was no advance public notice given for a maintenance window during the early-voting period, and what is the notice policy going forward?

6. Will the office publish a daily changelog/diff and add an automated duplicate-and-deletion check before any file is released?

7. Who is the CVR vendor, and can the relevant update/migration logs for June 1–3 be produced or independently audited? If so, please accept this email as a request under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act for those logs during that time period.