The Dinner Table, a Maine-based, conservative political action committee, wants to change Maine’s voting laws. Its proposal, Voter ID for ME, will likely be a referendum on the November ballot. Maine’s secretary of state opposes the proposal, and Maine’s League of Women Voters calls the plan “pure voter suppression that attacks our voting rights and absentee voting.”

Voter ID for ME presumes voter fraud in Maine. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that organized Project 2025, investigated voter fraud in each state between 1982 and 2024. It found two fraud cases in Maine in those 42 years, neither in a presidential election. Mainers cast 7.7 million votes in those elections between 1984 and 2024.

For almost 50 years, Maine’s voter registration and participation rates have been among the highest in the country. Why does Maine have no voter fraud, but high voter registration and turnout? There are three reasons.

First, Maine broadly distributes information about voter eligibility (18 or older, U.S. citizen and resident of the municipality where you want to vote), and Maine election officials encourage citizens to register and vote. Voting is managed by neighbors who are election officials and volunteers.

Second, local and state election officials maintain accurate voter lists. Here’s data from the Maine secretary of state’s report to legislators for Jan. 1, 2025:

• Maine’s voting age population: 1,146,670.
• Active voters: 1,040,701 (90.8% of those eligible).
• In 2024, “municipal election clerks and registrars across the state processed a total of 200,463 voter registration applications, resulting in 81,619 new voter registration records and 118,844 changes to existing voter registration records.”
• In 2024, a total of 22,611 voter records were canceled on the voting lists because a voter had died, had a duplicate record, moved from their municipality of registration, had a hearing and were deemed ineligible or had requested removal from the list.

Election officials review voter lists, apply legal eligibility standards, communicate with thousands of people about their voter status, update records and eliminate people from voter lists. Their expertise and impartiality are key to Maine’s election integrity.

Third, absentee ballots encourage voter participation. Maine has “no excuse” absentee ballots. You don’t need a reason or “excuse” to get an absentee ballot. You just ask.

In November 2020, at the height of COVID-19, more than half a million Mainers voted with absentee ballots. That was over 60% of all Maine votes cast in that election. In 2024, a total of 373,841 absentee ballots were cast in Maine as more voters chose to vote in person. Absentee ballots still represented 44% of all votes.

The Voter ID for ME plan reduces the number of days to return an absentee ballot, makes it illegal to request an absentee ballot by phone, requires extensive information from a family member or neighbor helping a voter with an absentee ballot, restricts a town or city to one drop box for absentee ballots, and requires Mainers to go through a redundant process to receive an absentee ballot for each election. This is voter suppression.

This proposal restricts absentee voting, disenfranchises Maine voters (especially rural and older voters) and will reduce Maine’s voter participation rates. Its real harm is evident in one detail of their proposal. It states that “during the absentee voting period, a bipartisan team of election officials shall periodically remove absentee ballots from each secured drop box and deliver the absentee ballots to the clerk’s office to be stored in a secure manner.”

Currently, municipal clerks or their designees take absentee ballots out of the drop boxes into their office for storage until counted. These same people manage voter lists, help eligible citizens onto the voting list, move ineligible people off the list and manage election details. We can’t trust them to carry absentee ballots from the drop box into their office?

Generating pervasive mistrust of democratic institutions (such as elections) precedes the dissolution of democracy.