Maine state voter enrollment data from February 2025 has been removed without notice from the Secretary of State’s official website. This specific dataset was the focus of a previous TMP article from last August exploring an 8,000% spike, followed by a near 100% decline, in total inactive voters*.
Using voter data available from Maine’s Secretary of State’s website (SoS), the previous TMP article showed that from June 2022 to November 2022, the total number of inactive voters statewide jumped over 216k within just 5 months.
Then, following that massive spike, from November 2024 to February 2025, 184k or 99.7% of Maine’s inactive voters were removed from the voter roles, leaving just 534 inactive voters statewide.
After a recent review of the current Voter Data page and Previous Enrollment Data page from the SoS’s website, it was discovered that the February 2025 data showing this near 100% decline within just 3 months was no longer available to view or download.
Archived versions of the SoS’s Voter Data page from November 19th, 2025 and December 17th 2025 shows that this is the time-frame when the February 2025 data was taken off the SoS’s Voter Data page and replaced with data released in November 2025.
Normally, when voter data is taken off the SoS’s Voter Data page, it’s moved to their Previous Enrollment Data page. However, an archived version of the Previous Enrollment Data page from January 11th, 2026, does not appear to have it listed. Nor is it listed currently within the Previous Enrollment Data page on the SoS’s website
Also, reviewing those same two SoS web-pages, it appeared that, sometime between September 15, 2025 and November 9, 2025, the data reported for January 18th, 2024 had been removed but datasets for November 7th, 2023 had been added.
However, after clicking on supposed November 2023 voter data, the actual data that downloads are the datasets from January 2024 and are labeled as such within the documents. Which is unfortunate because had they actually gone and added data from 2023, it would have been the only voter data released for that entire year.
The Maine Polis article from last August speculated that such a dramatic spike and then rapid decline could’ve been a reason the US Department of Justice wants to see Maine’s un-redacted voter rolls…and why Secretary Bellows is fighting there access in court.
However, mislabeling links months after they had already been released and then taking a link down and not putting it back up on a different page could be dismissed as effectively being clerical errors and not an intentional effort to obfuscate certain data points.
But at the very least, these oversights are just further examples of dumb mistakes coming out of Maine’s Secretary of State’s Office that have real world consequences. Some state employee’s inability to copy & paste a link into a different page and hit save now means publicly available voter data has effectively been removed without notice. While it still can be tracked down on 3rd party archive sites, someone looking through the data for the first time wouldn’t know it was missing and so wouldn’t know to go look for it.
If it were any other dataset, it may not raise as big of a red flag. But when its the very data point that raised questions in the first place that’s suddenly no longer available for download, one cant help but wonder if there’s either an on-going effort to obscure what happened to some 200k voters or SoS employees responsible for managing data on there website are doing a very poor job and are likely not receiving enough oversight. Frankly, either seem possible.
*According to Maine Statute Title 21-A, A voter becomes “inactive” after a municipal registrar or the secretary of state’s office thinks the voter has moved and sends them a change of address form to their last known address. If there is no response before another election is held, then the voter is marked “inactive”.
If two general elections pass without the inactive voter casting ballots in any municipal, state or federal election, then, at that point, they’re supposed to be removed from the voter rolls entirely.
–TMP