Maine Wire readers and talk radio listeners this week may have followed the imbroglio between me and the Secretary of State’s office this week regarding overseas voters. So I wanted to offer a simple explanation of what happened. For a more in-depth look, read our coverage here.
But here’s the skinny:
Under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), voters outside the U.S. get to register to vote by email or fax and can submit their ballots in the same fashion. The UOCAVA (pronounced: U-oh-KAVA by those in the biz…) votes typically slant left and usually make up only a small portion of the total electorate. Contrary to popular belief, only one-third or so are military voters. Unlike most Absentee Ballots, the voters don’t go through the local election clerk but are processed by muckety-mucks in the Secretary of State’s office.
This year, the number of UOCAVA voters was larger than in previous years. The votes even may have tipped the scales in a few races. Some candidates thought they’d won their elections the night of Nov. 5 only to see mysterious UOCAVA numbers telegraphed in from the Secretary of State’s office that ended up pushing the Democrat candidate into the lead.
Naturally, there was scrutiny of the numbers. This led to the discovery that the Secretary of State’s published data and instructions for interpreting that data were inadequate for identifying all overseas Absentee Ballot requesters. Politicos and candidates had questions about how to interpret the data, but election officials weren’t answering them. Once the Maine Wire caught wind of this, we politely emailed Bellows’ communications person, Deputy Secretary Emily Cook, and asked how to make sense of the data.
Cook decided to ignore the inquiry.
The public information the Secretary of State’s office posted online was impossible to decipher, even for career Maine political professionals. Despite receiving questions for several days from Dinner Table, the Maine Wire, the Maine GOP, the RNC, local representatives, and the Theriault campaign, the Secretary of State refused to provide any answers. That understandably caused the curiosity to grow. It wasn’t until she was confronted with a question during a live radio interview on WVOM’s George Hale and Ric Tyler Show that she finally said something about UOCAVA and overseas voting.
When finally confronted publicly with the question that multiple elected officials, party officials, public officials, and members of the media were asking, Secretary Bellows cackled, called it a conspiracy, and said the concern was based on outdated data. Bellows either didn’t know the answer, intentionally misled the listeners (her employers), or didn’t want to be transparent for some weird reason.
You can listen to that segment below along with my response:
Later, when we confronted Bellows and her staff in-person at the Ranked-Choice Voting calculation, they stonewalled. When they realized that I wasn’t leaving the room without an answer, and I was going to continue publicly embarrassing them on social media until they answered the damn question, they huddled privately for 10-15 minutes, and then returned to provide a new answer.
The new answer contradicted what Bellows had said hours earlier on the radio. There was no “outdated data” or “conspiracy” theory. Again, Bellows either lied or spoke out of ignorance. Instead, there was a key piece of missing information — information that only one or two people at the Secretary of State’s office had, one of whom was out sick with COVID-19. That information, once we literally embarrassed government employees into coughing it up, eventually did allow all parties concerned to look at the data and make the numbers add up. With that piece of information, everyone went on with their lives.
Emily Cook could have responded to me or anyone with a brief, “Looking into it will get back to you.” Or “Here’s the explanation.” That would have saved her boss a lot of embarrassment. She chose to take a different path. The path she chose to take was to ignore political professionals and journalists based on their political affiliations — or her perceptions of their political affiliations.
What explains the weird viewpoint discrimination emanating from the Secretary of State’s office?
It could be that Bellows and Cook had a little Middlebury-Colby tête-à-tête and decided that it would be funny or politically advantageous to fuel concerns about overseas voters. Perhaps they expected the Theriault campaign, the Maine Wire, or Republican officials to begin caterwauling about stolen elections and ballot stuffing. Then, in this hack hypothetical, they could have swooped in with the secret information they had previously refused to provide and expose the right-wing kooks and conspiracy theorists.
The only problem is no one accused Bellows of trying to “steal the election.” Instead, people asked a legitimate question and waited for her to be transparent about it. Bellows and Cook refused to do their (taxpayer-funded) jobs, while conservatives asked legitimate questions.
Politically, it was a bizarre spectacle, and Bellows won herself no friends on the left or the right through the public self-immolation. I rather doubt “Emerge Maine” will be celebrating this affray as one of their media training successes. Although I’m happy to go a few rounds with midwit government hacks in order to get answers to basic questions, it feels a little unnecessary—like Jake Paul beating up a 58-year-old Mike Tyson.
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