The Maine Secretary of State’s office responded Wednesday to inquiries from media, party officials, elected representatives, and political professionals about the role overseas votes played in Maine’s 2024 elections and how the office accounts for overseas Absentee Ballot requests in public data.
Last week, Maine’s elections saw an unprecedented number of overseas votes cast by U.S. citizens living outside of the United States — 6,589 in the presidential election.
The Reagan-era Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) allows military personnel and any U.S. citizens living abroad to cast votes in jurisdictions where they previously lived by fax, email, or mail-in ballot.
Those votes, which are handled directly by the Secretary of State’s office rather than local election officials, ended up playing a decisive role in several State House races — with overseas voters perhaps even helping Democrats retain control of the state legislature.
The overseas votes were, as in previous years, overwhelmingly for Democrats, with Vice President Kamala Harris garnering 5,310 votes to Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s 986 votes.
Similarly, in Maine’s Second Congressional District race between incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Golden and Republican State Rep. Austin Theriault, Golden got 2,174 UOCAVA votes while Theriault received 526.
As a result of the closeness of those races — as well as Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ controversial decision to trigger a Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) process in the Golden-Theriault race and a pending recount request from Theriault — the UOCAVA votes were subjected to closer than usual scrutiny by party officials, campaign officials, and political professionals.
Dozens of people were asking: What are these UOCAVA votes? Why are they 80 percent Democrat? And why do they just happen to be tipping races in favor of Democrats?
As election returns rolled in on the evening of Nov. 5, several candidates saw their fortunes suddenly shift once the UOCAVA votes were added into the vote totals by the Secretary of State, only furthering concern about the nature and provenance of the ballots.
The subsequent post-election scrutiny centered on the Absentee Ballot file the Secretary of State made public on Nov. 5 at 3pm and a separate accounting of the UOCAVA vote totals that became public later in the evening.
Inquiring minds seeking to understand the apparent gap between UOCAVA vote totals and UOCAVA ballot requests began reviewing the data made public by the Secretary of State.
The large data file of the Absentee Ballot applications for all Absentee Voters, including overseas or UOCAVA voters, is accompanied by difficult-to-understand instructions on how to decipher the text when using Microsoft Excel or other third-party software.
However, those instructions did not include adequate information for any of the Republican officials, including officials with decades of experience working Maine elections, to understand why the number of Absentee Ballot applications listed under the code for UOCAVA, i.e. “UR”, did not match the number of UOCAVA ballots counted in Maine’s elections.
Within the Absentee Ballot data file, under the label of “UOCAVA Request,” the Secretary of State’s data included only application information for roughly 1,900 voters, whereas the certified election results counted more than 6,500.
That discrepancy naturally led to questions about where the Absentee Ballot applications were for the approximately 4,600 UOCAVA votes certified in last Tuesday’s elections.
In the time since the results were certified on Nov. 5, Dinner Table PAC Executive Director Alex Titcomb, Maine Republican Party Chairman Jason Savage, Rep. Theriault’s campaign, and some local elected officials had all inquired with the Secretary of State’s office about the lack of clarity around the Absentee Ballot data.
The Maine Wire learned of the apparent gap in the UOCAVA data from Titcomb, endeavored to verify his findings, and also found that there were more UOCAVA votes counted than ballot applications listed under the UOCAVA label in the Absentee Ballot data file.
On Friday, the Maine Wire submitted the following question to Deputy Secretary of State Emily Cook, who handles media relations for the Secretary of State’s office: “What’s the explanation for this difference in recorded UOCAVA votes vs UOCAVA AB requests?”
In our inquiry, the Maine Wire explicitly suggested that the apparent gap was likely the result of some misunderstanding of the data or a need for the data to be updated, writing, “My assumption would be that there is an avenue by which some cohort of UOCAVA voters get AB ballots that doesn’t require them to fill out an AB request form, like certain federal employees as opposed to US citizens temporarily living/working abroad.”
“I’m also not the only one looking at the data and asking the question, so the sooner we can get the explanation out there, the faster we can stop unhelpful theories from growing,” the Maine Wire wrote in our email to Deputy Sec. Cook.
Secretary Bellows further added to the lack of clarity around the issue during a radio appearance on the George Hale and Ric Tyler Show by sharing false information about the issue.
When host Ric Tyler asked, at the prompting of the Maine Wire, about the issue, Bellows suggested that questions about the Absentee Ballot data were “conspiracies” based on “outdated” data.
On Wednesday, when the Maine Wire attended the controversial Ranked-Choice Voting tabulation for the Golden-Theriault race in an attempt to find an answer to the question, Cook initially declined to provide any new information about the matter.
Asked about the UOCAVA gap and Bellows earlier comments about “outdated” data, Cook repeated the same answer continuously and refused to say whether Bellows would ever answer any media questions about the issue at any point in the future.
Later, after conferring in private with Bellows, Cook was able to read something from her phone to the Maine Wire.
According to the information that Cook had on her phone, the confusion over the overseas votes was the result of the Secretary of State’s office not categorizing all UOCAVA votes under the label for UOCAVA votes.
Instead, some UOCAVA Absentee Ballot applications get categorized under various other labels — labels that would give even seasoned political professionals no way of inferring that those applications are from overseas or UOCAVA voters, even in conjunction with the published instructions for interpreting the data.
Cook did not clarify what Bellows meant when she had earlier told GHRT that questions about the 1,900 versus 6,500 UOCAVA numbers were based on “outdated” information, as the new answer contradicted what Bellows had said earlier.
According to the new explanation from Cook’s iPhone, UOCAVA Absentee Ballot requests — in addition to sometimes falling under the category for UOCAVA Absentee Ballot requests — can also fall under the categories for “Electronic Requests (ER)” or “Federal Write-in (FW)”.
With that piece of previously non-public information, campaign officials were able to determine that the number of UOCAVA Absentee Ballot applications roughly matched the number of UOCAVA votes counted in Maine’s elections, with some leeway given to voters who blanked certain races or are members of the state’s address privacy program.
During Wednesday’s UOCAVA imbroglio, Cook was unable to answer some of the Maine Wire’s other questions about how the Secretary of State’s office handles ballots requests and ballots submitted from foreign IP Addresses. She did deny, however, that there was ever any glitch or issue with any of the third-party vendors that the office uses to collect and process UOCAVA votes.
It’s unclear why the Secretary of State’s office did not respond to Maine GOP officials, several elected officials, the Theriault campaign, or the Maine Wire prior to being confronted on the radio and in-person on Wednesday.
It’s also not clear why the response Bellows provided on the radio contradicted the information later provided by Cook.
The Maine Wire has obliged Cook’s request for additional emailed questions by sending along our questions regarding the UOCAVA voting process.
Those questions include:
- Does the SOS believe that the inquiries about UOCAVA AB votes were answerable based on publicly available information without the information you provided in person today?
- Does the Secretary of State’s office, either itself or through a third-party vendor, track the IP addresses, fax numbers, or email addresses by which UOCAVA ballots are submitted when they’re not mailed in?
- What are the names of the third-party vendors that the Secretary of State’s office uses to assist with locating, contacting, registering, and providing ballots to UOCAVA voters? What are the names of the third-party vendors that the Secretary of State’s office uses to process UOCAVA ballots of any kind once they are received?
- Was there ever, at any point during the most recent election cycle, an issue, glitch, or problem with the Secretary of State’s systems or third-party vendors’ systems that caused the SOS office to delete UOCAVA registrations, or attempted registrations?
- Did the Secretary of State’s office or its UOCAVA third-party vendors identify and block any fraudulent attempts to register as a UOCAVA voter or submit UOCAVA ballots? How many?
Any responses to those questions will be the subject of future Maine Wire reporting.
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