Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows speaks with counsel representing the Trump campaign and challengers to his ballot eligibility during a December 15, 2023, hearing in Augusta. (Emma Davis/ Maine Morning Star)
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows officially responded to the U.S. Department of Justice’s request for sweeping voter data, questioning the federal agency’s intentions and asking that the request be withdrawn.
The letter, sent Friday, comes after Bellows, a Democrat who is running for governor in 2026, told Maine Morning Star last month that she planned to tell the DOJ it does not have the right to such information.
In the letter addressed to Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael Gates, Bellows wrote that she has “grave concerns about the seemingly overbroad scope of the Department of Justice’s information and records requests, which do not appear to be correlated with legitimate investigatory needs.”
The DOJ declined to answer Maine Morning Star’s request for comment. The DOJ is asking for voter information from all 50 states, according to the National Association of Secretaries of State. Maine Morning Star’s partner outlets have been following these probes in at least nine other states so far.
Bellows requested that the DOJ provide an explanation of why it made such requests in Maine, which included the statewide voter registration list, names of officials who handle the list’s maintenance and the number of ineligible voters the state identified due to noncitizenship, among other information about the state’s election processes.
“The United States Constitution entrusted the states, not the federal government, with responsibility for administering elections, and that’s a critically important check and balance on potential federal abuse of power,” Bellows shared in a statement on Monday. “The Department of Justice doesn’t get to know everything about you just because they want to, and I will do everything in my power to protect the privacy and security of Maine voters.”
Bellows received the detailed request from the the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ on July 24, following a less expansive inquiry from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys on July 10 for a phone call with Bellows to discuss a “potential information-sharing agreement” to provide the DOJ with information on registered voters in Maine.
In her response on Friday, Bellows also rejected the premise of some of the DOJ’s requests, including questioning the data provided for the election administration and voting survey conducted by the Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency of the U.S. government created by Congress in 2002 to aid the states in conducting safe and secure elections.
For example, the July 24 request noted that Maine’s survey response showed that there were nearly as many registered voters listed as active as the citizen voting age population in Maine in 2024, with a registration rate of 92.4%. The letter went on to request further details about the state’s response, such as information about the actions Maine is taking to ensure that ineligible voters are being removed and a list of all duplicate registrants the state has removed.
“Mainers should be extremely proud that our state is a national leader in voter registration and voter turnout,” Bellows said in a statement Monday. “Every eligible voter in Maine has the right to vote and should be encouraged to do so. Why the Department of Justice would question Maine’s success is beyond me and smacks of federal interference in our elections.”
Read the full letter:
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