'…[V]irtually every one of these rules was violated over and over again by a small cadre of political activists…' The Maine Wire reports.
As President Donald Trump raised growing concerns about the integrity of Minnesota's elections, outgoing and shrill Gopher State Senator, Tina Smith, warned that Trump was "laying the groundwork to steal an election." It was an interesting take from someone in a Democrat Party that appears to actually be doing things to steal an election.
Take the Somali "interpreters" story in Maine, for instance.
The Maine Wire reports that it has obtained and tracked 140 hours of security footage from Lewiston City Hall under the Maine's Freedom of Access Act. The video, according to the conservative news outlet, shows staffers from left-wing nongovernmental organizations serving as "interpreters" — assisting "more than 200 apparently non-English speaking voters through early voters." In several clips, the assistants "appear to point at choices on ballots and even fill them out," the Wire reports.
That's not kosher under Maine election law, which limits ballot instruction from translators.
Within the voting site, an individual may not instruct another in the method of marking the ballot, except as provided under Section 672 of the statute. Within 250 feet of the entrance of a polling station, individuals are prohibited from influencing another person's choice of candidate or referendum question on the ballot.
"As is evident from the CCTV video, virtually every one of these rules was violated over and over again by a small cadre of political activists who can be seen shepherding illiterate Somali voters through the ballot-casting process," investigative reporter Steve Robinson, Editor-in-Chief of The Maine Wire first reported.
In one instance, video appears to show a translator stepping into the voting booth while the voter steps aside and watches.
"The Maine Wire points out the rules broken on camera. An aide can't approach or interrupt a voter who is already in the booth, can't handle the ballot, and has to leave the voting area with the voter," the outlet asserts in a Facebook post, which includes a clip.
On Friday, U.S. Attorney for Maine Andrew B. Benson confirmed his office is looking into the matter.
"We review all evidence concerning complaints of voter intimidation and election interference, including the video from Lewiston's early voting at City Hall," Benson told The Wall Street Journal. "We will not tolerate threats to the integrity of our elections, and we look forward to working with the Attorney General's Office and the Secretary of State's office to defend our democracy."
“We review all evidence concerning complaints of voter intimidation and election interference, including the video from Lewiston’s early voting at City Hall,” U.S. Attorney for Maine Andrew Benson told The Robinson Report.
— Steve Robinson (@SteveRob) October 30, 2026
“We will not tolerate threats to the integrity of our…
'Death Threats, Doxing, and Cries of Racism'
Democrats and their friends in the accomplice media quickly framed the story as "voter intimidation," accusing the Maine Wire of harassing Somali Americans.
"They felt very unsafe. They definitely felt threatened," Jodi Cohen Hayashida, a Unitarian minister in Auburn, Maine and an organizer with Maine People's Alliance, told News Center Maine. "We're talking about citizens. So these are people who have the legal right to vote."
The leftist Maine People's Alliance backs left-leaning Democrat Party candidates and fiscally sponsors left-of-center organizations and initiatives, according to nonprofit tracker InfluenceWatch. Some of its members marched through city hall in solidarity with the Somalis as voters cast early ballots. At least three people filed complaints, The Maine Wire reported.
Right on cue, Democrats have leveled charges of targeting "people of color" as part of a "broader pattern of harassment" against Lewiston's much-maligned Somali community.
Maine, like Minnesota and many other states, has a welfare fraud problem, with some Somali-Americans at the center of fraud scandals.
Shenna Bellows, Maine's TDS-suffering secretary of state who failed this year to grab the Maine Democratic Party's nominations for governor and U.S. Senate, wants to silence questions about potential fraud in the Pine Tree State's elections. She called Maine Wire's reporting on the Somali "translator" issue the work of a "political operative" harassing voters by asking them "unwanted questions."
Bellows recently decried current laws that don't more tightly restrict people from tracking potential misconduct during Maine's early-voting season.
"I would like to see in the next legislative session strengthening the prohibitions in that early-voting period to have them more in line with what we see on Election Day," the extremely partisan secretary of state told Maine's WMTW in an interview that challenged none of her assertions. She added that on Election Day, there will be "zero tolerance" for asking voters questions that make them feel uncomfortable, like whether they are eligible to vote in U.S. elections.
Meanwhile, The Maine Wire's Jon Fetherston claimed in recent social media posts that his reporting on the suspect Somali interpreter story has brought him "death threats, doxing, and cries of racism."
Exposing fraud and electioneering has inevitably led to death threats, doxing, and cries of racism.
— The Maine Wire (@TheMaineWire) October 30, 2026
But with the stuff we are prepared to publish in the coming days, it's easy to see why fraudsters and scam artists are lashing out: pic.twitter.com/RZUVBeEXpl
'Are You a Democrat?'
Lewiston City Clerk and Registrar of Voters Kathy Montejo said she has sent complaints of both voter intimidation and electioneering to Bellows' office. Elections officials also have put up signs around city hall noting state restrictions on recording voters.
"It is important that this be addressed so voters feel safe and comfortable and confident when they're going into their voting place to be able to vote," Montejo told News Center Maine.
But the Maine Wire appears to have properly obtained the closed-circuit video of the polls through the state's open records law. Election officials have yet to adequately explain what looks like some legally suspect activity at Lewiston's polls.
At the same time, Janet Beaudoin, a Republican candidate for the Maine House of Representatives, claims while she was going to cast her early ballot an "interpreter" proposed a quid pro quo.
"Last week while I was greeting voters in the hallway, an interpreter who was with a voter turned to me and asked, 'Janet, are you a Democrat?' I told them I could not discuss politics so close to the polls. He then pointed to the voter and said, 'I'll tell him to vote for Janet if you're a Democrat,'" Beaudoin said at a press conference last month.
The city clerk has since posted signs around voting sites informing voter assistants that they can only read the ballot and mark it according to the voter's wishes.
U.S. Department of Justice monitors are expected to be at the polls in Portland and Lewiston to observe Tuesday's elections.
'Some Noncitizens'
Last week, Bellows and other Democrat elections officials told The New York Times that they were planning for federal government "interference" in the midterm elections.
"This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections," the Maine politician told the publication. "It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states."
Bellows and her election integrity denier friends have given voters plenty of reasons to be concerned about how Democrats might smash election law in this midterm election. It was Bellows, after all, who lost her unconstitutional push to boot Trump from Maine's 2024 primary ballot. Bellows also admitted that her state's voter rolls contained "some noncitizens." She appears to have done nothing to remove them.
Bellows, like other liberal election officials and so-called voter-rights activists, has long claimed that worries about noncitizens on state voter rolls are just a ruse by Trump and Republicans to erode faith in elections. Bellows' office did not return The Federalist's request for comment seeking an estimate of how many noncitizens populate Maine's voter list.
As Fox News Digital reported, the Public Interest Legal Foundation says it has identified nearly 3,200 potentially dead voters and 693 duplicate registrations on Maine's voter registration database.
"Now we know why they were hiding them because there were problems on them," J. Christian Adams, the legal foundation's president and chief legal counsel, told Fox News Digital. "They have dead people, they have lots of duplicates and they have general problems. It's something that should have been fixed a long time ago."
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