The Maine Secretary of State’s Office pressured Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to remove posts that they flagged as “misinformation” — including a post reporting an incident of potential ballot stuffing — in the leadup to the 2022 midterm elections, emails obtained by the Maine Wire show.

The emails, received under Maine’s Freedom of Access Access (FOAA), reveal that the Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ communications director, Emily Cook, repeatedly flagged Facebook posts as “misinformation” and reported them to be censored.

CISA, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security founded ostensibly to combat cybersecurity threats in 2018, had “a formal “Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation” (MDM) team and collaborated with the nonprofit Center for Internet Security (CIS) on a “portal” for election officials to flag and censor social media “misinformation” during the 2020 general election and beyond, according to a 2023 report from the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The entire system for politically driven censorship has drawn heightened criticism as Americans have learned more about just how far federal officials went to police online conversations about elections, COVID-19, and more. The records from Bellow’s office show that Maine’s election officials were eager participants in the censorship effort.

In one exchange dated Oct. 28, 2022, Cook reported a Facebook post made in the Bridgton Republican Election Integrity Group to the CIS misinformation portal over a “Claim that people are stuffing ballots into an absentee drop box.”

“Tweeter says that someone reported seeing someone else stuff ballots into a box, claims the limit for number of ballots someone can have is two,” Cook wrote.

Cook dismissed the notion that potential election fraud could have occurred, writing, “Maine allows immediate family members to return someone’s ballot to their
municipal office or absentee ballot drop box as well as third-party people to return others’ ballots, but may only have five in their possession at a time.”

“The rumored situation wouldn’t have happened, and if it did, we would have received actual notification about it,” Cook wrote.

In just a little over an hour, the Maine Secretary of State’s Office received a reply from a Meta representative thanking Cook for reporting the post and saying that they had taken down the Facebook post.

Days later, on Nov. 1, 2022, Cook reported another post from a Facebook group called “Freedom Fighters Maine,” in which, according to Cook, a member of group claimed “that he imagines that mock election votes (from a purely civics education exercise for Maine students) will be counted, along with ‘all the new illegal voters in this election’ [parentheses added by Cook].”

Cook wrote that “only voters who register (which includes providing proof of residency and identification) may vote.”

The Maine Wire has previously reported on comments made by the South Portland Clerk and Registrar of Votes that indicated there is no legal requirement for voter registrants in Maine to check immigration status.

Maine requires people attempting to register to vote to check a box saying that they are a citizen, sign the form, and present some form of ID and proof of residence. Photo ID is not required, and Maine also accepts out-of-state IDs for voter registration, such as drivers licenses from any of the 19 states that issue licenses to illegal immigrants.

Again, the misinformation report from the Maine Secretary of State’s Office led to Meta removing the Facebook post within hours of Cook’s email.

The Maine Secretary of State’s Office also had several emails from last year with X, formerly known as Twitter, that indicate the office had reported at least five posts in an attempt to get them removed from the platform.

Email responses from Twitter Support indicate that four of the requests by the Maine Secretary of State’s Office to have posts censored were denied, with the platform stating the posts were not in violation of its rules.

In one April 2024 email to the head of government affairs at X, Wilfredo Fernandez, Cook referenced a specific post — that, ironically, was accusing the Secretary of State of civil rights violations — and appeared to ask why the post was still on the platform despite her having reported it.

“Is this the sort of tweet that would get taken down during the escalation period (or the rest of the year)? Or no, since it is still up after I reported it?” Cook wrote.

The post in question reads is a reply to the Maine Secretary of State’s X account, and reads, “You in the Department of the Secretary of State are the problem. There is SoS, only a secretary response. Your continuous lack of transparency and blatant Civil Rights violations are prime examples of why Jan. 6th. occurred in the first place. Your day will come!”