Maine voters rejected a referendum on Tuesday that would have required a photo ID to cast a ballot and that proposed multiple changes to Maine’s increasingly popular absentee voting process.
The Associated Press called the race at 9:54 p.m. as initial returns showed strong opposition to Question 1 in more left-leaning coastal Maine but also in some areas of rural western and central Maine. Question 1 was failing 39% to 61% with more than half of the statewide votes counted, according to the AP.
The lopsided outcome represents the latest political defeat for conservatives on an issue that they have been pursuing in Maine for more than a decade. Conservative activists collected more than 170,000 petition signatures to place the issue on the statewide ballot this year after repeatedly failing to get voter ID bills through the Maine Legislature.
But the “overwhelming grassroots support” that campaign organizers said they witnessed during the petition drive failed to carry through to Election Day. Instead, the campaign struggled to compete against better-funded opponents who seized on the proposed changes to absentee balloting as they portrayed Question 1 as an underhanded attempt to disenfranchise voters and making voting more difficult.