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- Derek Weston via fox - Politics
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Group flags 3,181 potentially dead voters on Maine rolls days before midterms
ReGroup flags 3,181 potentially dead voters on Maine rolls days before midterms
A conservative legal group says Maine's voter rolls include thousands of potentially dead registrants and hundreds of duplicates, and it is pressing the state to act before Election Day.
A conservative legal group has filed an election complaint in Maine alleging that more than 3,000 potentially dead people and hundreds of duplicate registrations remain on the state's voter rolls, just days before the midterm elections. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, known as PILF, says it identified 3,181 potentially dead voters and 693 duplicate registrations, and it is urging state officials to take action as Mainers prepare to cast their ballots.
The complaint was filed with Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. It argues that election officials have not made a «reasonable effort» to remove ineligible voters from the official list. The group is asking the state to take «additional corrective action» and to review its analysis, immediately remove ineligible voters, and put in place a plan to comply with the Help America Vote Act, a 2002 election reform law, both now and in the future. PILF warned that if nothing is done, it «may have no other recourse» but to pursue an appeal through the complaint process under that law.
PILF's findings were compared with a previous investigation it conducted in 2025, which identified 18,453 potentially dead voters and 1,498 duplicate or triplicate registration records in Maine. According to the group, the state addressed many of those records that year, but some errors remain and «new problems have arisen.» The analysis searched for records that shared the same address, first and last names and birth year, and it also looked for typos, punctuation errors, common nicknames and birth-year discrepancies.
Dan Adams, speaking for the group, said the state should have caught the problems itself. «Why does it take a third-party group like the Public Interest Legal Foundation to find these duplicates?» he said. «They have dead people, they have lots of duplicates and they have general problems. It's something that should have been fixed a long time ago.» He voiced hope that Bellows would «get the job done» and remove the duplicates.
Adams also described a longer dispute between the group and the state. PILF sued Maine roughly six years ago over access to the state's voter rolls and won a federal appeals court case in 2024 that required the state to make the records public. Adams accused Bellows of a history of not wanting the public to know how well the office is performing, and he said she was focusing on «defending sort of blue theories» rather than keeping voter lists accurate. Fox News Digital reached out to Bellows' office for comment.
Adams's central concern is that a deceased person's registration could be used to cast an illegal vote. He said some state officials are reluctant to remove dead voters immediately for fear of wrongly removing eligible voters, which he argued could leave room for fraud. «The problem is that sometimes people vote for the dead people,» he said.
The complaint lands days before Mainers vote in a close U.S. Senate race between incumbent Republican Susan Collins and her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson. The outcome could determine the balance of power in the Senate.
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