Conservative Group Seeks to Put Voter ID Requirement on Maine’s Ballot in 2025
A citizen-led initiative in Maine seeks to put a voter ID requirement on the ballot in November 2025. On Monday, the group announced that it gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Voter ID for ME, a conservative group, said in a Facebook post that the group collected over 165,000 signatures — 125,000 of which were gathered on Election Day. The petition only needed 67,682 signatures, which was the number of votes cast for governor in the 2022 election.
“Collecting more than the required amount compensates for signatures that may be rejected by the Secretary of State,” the group said on its website. “We’ll succeed in getting the question on the ballot.”
Now, the campaign needs to send the signatures to Maine’s secretary of state to verify their validity and certify them if the threshold is met.
Next, the secretary of state would send the proposed amendment to the state Legislature, which can choose to enact the voter ID law directly or choose to not act on it, sending it to the ballot as a citizen-initiated constitutional amendment.
It’s unlikely that the Democratic-controlled Legislature will pass the law directly since they have rejected voter ID laws multiple times. The Maine GOP has repeatedly pushed this issue, with attempts dating back to 2011.
Voter ID for ME is led by The Dinner Table PAC, the largest conservative grassroots organization in Maine. Republican state Rep. Laurel Libby is one of the PAC’s founders.
Libby said the “overwhelming support” the petition received in signature-gathering efforts during the June primary election “underscores the public’s desire to strengthen our election process, even as the legislature refuses to do so.”
In one of its Facebook posts, Voter ID for ME said, “Only U.S. citizens should be able to vote in U.S. elections,” a statement that matches the GOP’s broader federal and state narratives about noncitizen voting. Maine requires people to provide their driver’s license number or state ID card to register to vote but not to cast their ballots at the polls.
Currently, 35 states have voter ID laws, but many states provide exceptions to these rules.
A survey released in June revealed that nearly 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens do not have a non-expired driver’s license, and Black and Hispanic voters are disproportionately less likely to have a license.
If this proposed amendment makes it onto the November 2025 ballot and voters approve it, numerous voters could be disenfranchised.