The Maine Secretary of State's Office said it changed the company that delivers voting materials to towns across Maine after hundreds of absentee ballots ended up at a private home.
In late-September, 250 absentee ballots that were supposed to be delivered by UPS to Ellsworth City Hall instead ended up in an Amazon box shipped to a woman in the Penobscot County town of Newburgh. News reports about the incident stated that the box, which also contained items ordered from Amazon, was damaged when it was delivered.
Law enforcement in Maine are still investigating the incident. But some Republican state officials have urged federal investigators to get involved and have used the incident to intensify their criticism of Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor.
Bellows declined to comment more on the incident Wednesday, citing the ongoing investigation. But she said her office decided to use a different carrier, Vital Delivery, rather than UPS for the last part of the delivery process because of the "interruption of the chain of custody" with the Ellsworth ballots.
All ballots have since been delivered to municipalities across the state without incident, Bellows said.
"We trust that law enforcement will get to the bottom of what happened and that the public will have answers," Bellows said. "And we trust that all of our partners will collaborate in that investigation. However, out of an abundance of caution, it seemed prudent to switch carriers given that we don't yet have answers about exactly what happened."
The secretary of state's office said Vital Delivery handled distribution of the ballots used on Election Day for 331 municipalities during the final round of deliveries. The deliveries were expected to cost $23,000, compared to an original estimate of $16,000 for UPS to deliver the ballots, according to data provided by Bellows' office.
Maine voters across the state will decide on two referendum questions during the November 4 elections. Question 1 would require voters to show a photo ID before casting a ballot and would make multiple changes to Maine's absentee balloting process while Question 2 proposes a "red flag" gun law.
Tampering with ballots and the delivery of ballots is already illegal under state law. And because of the ballot-tracking process required as part of Maine's absentee voting process, any absentee ballot that was cast without being assigned to a specific voter would not be counted on Election Day. Absentee ballots must also be returned to local clerks in a special envelope signed by the voter.
For security reasons, absentee ballot envelopes, the absentee ballots themselves and ballots to be cast on Election Day are shipped separately to municipalities at different times. Each shipment is tracked and municipal clerks are required to count the number of ballots that are delivered and transmit a ballot receipt to the Secretary of State's office.
"In summary, the process of printing and shipping absentee ballots contains numerous safeguards to protect the chain of custody," Bellows wrote last week to members of the Legislature's Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, which has oversight over election issues in the state. "Moreover, absentee voting itself has many more safeguards to ensure that a ballot can only be voted if it is associated with a legal registered voter and a valid absentee ballot request."
Republicans have continued to criticize Bellows for this and other issues, however. The Legislature's four top-ranking Republicans — Sens. Trey Stewart of Presque Isle and Mat Harrington of Sanford as well as Reps. Billy Bob Faulkingham of Winter Harbor and Katrina Smith of Palermo — sent a letter earlier this month to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel urging them to "open an investigation into the security of Maine's elections" following the incident with the Ellsworth ballots.
"The security of our elections is of the utmost importance and Maine citizens deserve to know our elections are safe, secure and transparent," the group wrote in their Oct. 1 letter to Bondi and Patel. Republicans have also called on Bellows to resign her post while she runs for governor, although there is no law requiring her resignation and previous secretaries of state from both parties have held the position while running for elective office.
Bellows has previously suggested that "bad actors" were behind the illegal interception and re-routing of the Ellsworth ballots. She said in an interview on Wednesday that the election integrity safeguards are working.
"The good news is that voting was uninterrupted," Bellows said. "And the checks and balances at every step of the process guarantee that no one can vote a ballot that falls outside of that chain of custody. Our elections remain safe and secure."
