Don’t scoff at the idea of voter fraud in Maine

Remember, as a kid, building forts and houses out of refrigerator boxes?

In the early 1990s, working as a partisan legislative staffer, I had an idea for the upcoming statewide election. Some of our state House and Senate candidates were campaigning in Districts where their victory was uncertain. A few more registered voters in those Districts favoring our candidates would be a good insurance policy.

Maine allows same-day voter registration, which worked in my favor. According to Maine law, “The deadline for in-person registration is the close of the polls on election day.” So my refrigerator box tenants could wait until the most advantageous moment to tell a busy town clerk they would like to newly register to vote.

It might be best to wait until the peak voting moment, when the town or city office voting booths are full, and residents on their way home after a crazy work day, are standing impatiently in line for a vacant voting booth.

Or maybe it would be best to register to vote at the last minute, when the town clerk is pooped, frazzled, and really doesn’t want to hear one more word about elections, thank you.

State law does require that voters be Maine residents: “The residence of a person is that place where the person has established a fixed and principal home to which the person, whenever temporarily absent, intends to return.”

That part of Maine law seemed to nix my refrigerator box scheme. I was almost ready to throw in the towel. Then I learned from legislators and others about the elasticity of the “temporarily absent” and “intends to return” phrases. I could be “temporarily absent” for 20 years, and until the day I die I could “intend to return” to my Maine home without actually returning.

Also in my favor was the “Nontraditional residence” part of Maine’s voting law: “A person may have a nontraditional residence, including, but not limited to a shelter, park or underpass. A person’s residency is not subject to challenge on the sole basis that the person has a nontraditional residence.”

If I timed our same-day voter registrations carefully, the clerk might not ask lots of other questions. But, if a clerk balked at one of my guys using, say, “Refrigerator Box D” as part of the street address, we planned on reminding the town official about what Maine’s voter law on nontraditional residences has to say about it. Would the clerk raise her question if my guys were living beneath an I-95 underpass?

Was I serious about my refrigerator box neighborhood? Of course not. But I am reminded of it when hearing elected officials, reporters, or political activists dismiss Voter ID in Maine with, “There is no evidence of voter fraud in Maine.”

The same sentiment held prior to 1992 before two aides to Maine’s House Speaker pleaded guilty to breaking into a State House legislative office, then into a Cross Building room where an election recount was taking place. The had additional marked ballots for the purpose of flipping the election to their candidate.

Do you suppose there were other election results flipped like this that we don’t know about? There was no way to know. Maine law allows the destruction of election data after two years.

I have been privy to sketchy election and political practices, some anecdotal. Anyone with 20-plus years in politics can probably say the same.

Navy SEALS chosen to test Cape Canaveral’s security system, breached the system, planting dummy explosives. Similarly, wouldn’t it be interesting to sanction a test of Maine’s voting system for weakest links?

Like NASA, we might be surprised.
Scott K. Fish has served as a communications staffer for Maine Senate and House Republican caucuses, and was communications director for Senate President Kevin Raye. He founded and edited AsMaineGoes.com and served as director of communications/public relations for Maine’s Department of Corrections until 2015. He is now using his communications skills to serve clients in the private sector.