This story will be updated.
Ellsworth reported that it was missing 250 absentee ballots on the same day a Newburgh woman said she found the same amount in her Amazon package, Maine’s top elections official told reporters Monday.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat who is running for governor, did not specifically say the ballots found were those that were missing from Ellsworth as that is still part of an ongoing criminal investigation involving police from her department as well as the FBI and other agencies. She also intimated that it could have been a deliberate action.
“This year, it seems that there may have been attempts to interrupt the distribution of ballots about materials, but we are stronger and better than anyone who tries to do our process harm,” she said at a State House news conference.
Bellows did not elaborate on that in a careful news conference. It was the first concrete set of facts laid out by state officials after The Maine Wire, the conservative media arm of the Maine Policy Institute, first published claims last week that authentic Maine ballots had been delivered to a Newburgh woman. She refused to speak with the Bangor Daily News.
After the Wire reported the claims, Maine Republican leaders were quick to question the integrity of the state’s election system and called for a federal inquiry before authorities had determined the facts of the strange allegation. The episode comes just a month before Maine voters are set to weigh in on whether or not photo ID should be required to vote.
After Ellsworth election officials discovered they were missing ballots, they immediately reached out to the secretary of state’s office, Bellows said. In Newburgh, no one contacted her office after the discovery of ballots until Wednesday morning, Bellows said.
While Bellows did not explicitly confirm that the ballots were intentionally sent to the Newburgh resident, she said it seems as though there have been “attempts to interrupt the distribution of ballots and ballot materials,” this year.
The secretary of state ignored questions from Steve Robinson, the editor of The Maine Wire, as well as another staffer of the site, saying she would not speak with “bloggers or legislators.”
