Voter ID Bill Likely Headed to Maine’s November Ballot

Feb 18, 2025
Jacob Grandstaff
Election Integrity

An amendment requiring photo ID and other election integrity measures will likely head to voters after signature verification.

Maine has the chance to safeguard its elections with a photo ID requirement this year after a grassroots conservative group collected two and a half times the required signatures to introduce a bill on the measure.

The Dinner Table executive director Alex Titcomb told Restoration News that volunteers accomplished the signature collection feat on a budget of less than $25,000. “Normally, you need half a million to a million to get on the ballot,” he said.

Maine is one of a handful of states that allows a form of direct democracy known as citizen-initiated statutes. To be considered, a citizen-initiated bill must receive signatures equal to 10 percent of the votes in the previous gubernatorial election. To meet that threshold, the Dinner Table’s photo ID initiative required at least 68,000 signatures.

“We ended up gathering over 171,000 signatures,” Titcomb added, “so well over double what we needed for it to qualify.”

State Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn) co-founded the Dinner Table with Titcomb in 2021. In an interview with Restoration News, she also praised the grassroots volunteers who made the petition drive a resounding success.

“We drew from multiple buckets of sources to find volunteers to distribute the petition,” Libby said. “We had 682 total collectors in addition to the volunteer notaries and others who helped in other ways. In all, we had just shy of 800 volunteers.”

Libby noted the effort began in April and early May, and they got their first signature on June 6. “We gathered around 40,000 signatures in the June primary and finished with around 125,000 on Election Day in November.”

“We purposely went out during election days to make sure we were only targeting registered voters,” she added. “So, not all, but most of our signatures were collected during those two days.”

The bill includes other minor election integrity measures. It repeals a portion of law that allowed voters to apply for absentee ballots by phone, ends the process of automatically sending absentee ballots to voters, and requires absentee voters to provide a copy of an approved photo ID or their photo ID number with their absentee ballot. It also limits drop boxes to one per municipality and stipulates a member of each party will retrieve them rather than election clerks.

The Dinner Table submitted the petition to the Secretary of State’s Office on January 6.

Titcomb called it “a beautiful story of regular Maine people coming together, working together” to pass it. “We had signatures from 294 individual municipalities, which is unheard of in recent citizens’ initiatives.”

Libby added that Maine residents understand requiring photo ID is not radical or extreme, but common sense. Pointing to the boxes of signatures in the State House, she said, “That’s not just a few people coming to a public hearing or whispering from various corners of Maine. That is a thunderous roar from every corner of our state.”

(RELATED: There Are No Sound Arguments Against Requiring Photo ID to Vote)

Democrats are Out of Touch with Their Own Voters on Photo ID

Thirty-six states—many led by Democrats—require some form of ID to vote, 21 of which require an official photo ID. Polls show 80 percent of Americans support photo ID requirements—including 60 percent of registered Democrats.

Still, elected Democrats continue to defer to left-wing extremist organizations like the League of Women Voters and the ACLU, who reliably feed them talking points out of touch with the party’s voter base.

Titcomb and Libby both remarked that the legislature has so far refused to pass a voter ID bill, despite its broad popularity. As recently as last June, Maine Democrats killed the effort to pass voter ID at the state level. Even “moderate” Democrat Rep. Jared Golden (ME-02), who is a rumored 2026 gubernatorial candidate, opposed a voter ID measure when he was in the state legislature.

Ethan Strimling, a former Democrat state senator and mayor of Portland—now a Democratic Socialists of America community organizer—calls it “a Jim Crow-style playbook” to make voters “dig out their ID” before voting. “These kinds of voter suppression techniques follow a long line of racist and classist history in America,” he bellows.

Secretary of State Bellows suggested the photo ID proposal misleads voters. She said “reasonable people can agree to disagree” on the voter ID aspect but called it a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” because of the absentee voter and ballot drop box tweaks.

Libby told Restoration News this is a dishonest scare tactic many opponents of photo ID are using. “The language of the bill was there and was very clear for everyone to read,” she said. “We didn’t sneak it in.”

Bellows tries to sound moderate on her party’s unpopular position, but she opposes requiring any form of ID to vote because voters already show identification—albeit a non-photo ID—for voter registration. In 2023, she argued before the state legislature that requiring photo ID “would result in logistical challenges, financial burdens and potential discrimination.”

Despite her alleged concerns with voter discrimination, Bellows tried to discriminate against all MAGA voters in her state by preventing President Donald Trump from appearing on the Maine primary ballot in 2024 until the Supreme Court struck down a similar attempt by the Colorado Supreme Court.

An Open Invitation to Voter Fraud

As Restoration News has reported, Maine is one of only seven states that allows the dangerous combination of same-day voter registration without requiring a photo ID. This would allow an illegal alien to register on Election Day with a fake name and address and immediately cast a ballot. Even if arrested, the illegal alien’s vote would still count.

A recent investigation comparing MaineCare records—which show an individual’s immigration status—and voter data from the Secretary of State’s Central Voter Registration discovered 10 noncitizens in Maine are registered to vote, eight of whom have cast a ballot since 2016. If extrapolated from the data sample, that would mean up to 40 percent of noncitizens registered for MaineCare were also registered to vote during the 2024 election.

As executive director of the Maine ACLU—before losing to Susan Collins (R) in the 2014 Senate race—Bellows helped lead the reinstatement of same-day voter registration after the legislature repealed it.

If Maine passes this bill into law, it will join 15 other states who allow same-day voter registration, but hedge its risk by requiring photo ID.

Once Bellows verifies the signatures, the amendment will go before the state legislature. If the legislature votes for the bill, it becomes law without having to go to the voters.

Libby said it’s customary in Maine for the legislature to pass on citizen-led statutes and let the people decide at the ballot.

“It’s possible, though, the legislature may look at the 170,000 signatures and just vote for it based on the overwhelming support,” she said. “But we do have a Democratic majority, so, that’s probably not going to happen.”

She expressed confidence the bill will pass if it makes it to the ballot.

“I do hope the people get to vote on it,” she said. “This has been an effort of Maine people to let their voices be heard on photo ID.”

Bellows has 30 business days to certify or reject the signatures. Titcomb estimates February 19 as the date when they will know the fate of the bill.

(READ MORE: Democrats Aim to Bring Ranked-Choice Voting Confusion to Virginia Elections)

Jacob Grandstaff is an Investigative Researcher for Restoration News specializing in election integrity and foreign affairs/national security. He graduated from the National Journalism Center in Washington, D.C.

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