This story will be updated.
AUGUSTA, Maine — Maine will not turn over voter registration data that President Donald Trump’s administration has been seeking from states, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said Tuesday.
Bellows, a Democrat, held a news conference in Augusta to share that update on what her office called the U.S. Department of Justice’s “unprecedented request” for access to voter registration lists from at least nine states. Pushback has come from both red and blue states, as the Republican secretary of state in neighboring New Hampshire also declined the Trump administration’s request last week by citing current statutes and cybersecurity concerns.
“Go jump in the Gulf of Maine,” Bellows said of her message to the Justice Department.
That remark echoed a “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico” comment from 2017 that Mississippi’s Republican secretary of state directed at a voter fraud commission Trump established during his first term.
Bellows said the national secretaries of state association is expecting all 50 states to eventually receive similar requests from the Justice Department. The DOJ’s requests to different states in recent months appear to revolve around a desire to remove ineligible voters from the rolls but also came as Trump has continued to falsely claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
Additionally, the Maine Republican Party claimed in June it found more than 600 duplicative voting records and evidence of voters casting multiple ballots here, but the secretary of state’s office conducted a review and said those claims are without merit.
The request from the federal government was dated Thursday. A Justice Department spokesperson, Natalie Baldassarre, declined to comment Tuesday when asked about Bellows’ update.
Wisconsin and Minnesota have also not turned over voter registration records at the Trump administration’s request. Wisconsin election officials pointed Justice Department officials to a state law that would require the department to pay $12,500 for the data and said the federal government has not followed up on the request.
Bellows is running for governor in 2026. She ruled Trump ineligible for the Maine Republican primary ballot in late 2023, citing his role in inciting the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021. That decision thrust the state’s top election official into the national spotlight, and her decision was overturned last spring by the U.S. Supreme Court.
