📰BIDDEFORD | Why It's So Important Question 1 Failed

Opinion: Why It’s So Important that Question 1 Failed

By Ian Garcia-Theriault

November 5, 2025, Maine voters recently rejected Question 1, which would have required voter ID and rolled back parts of our absentee voting system. I’m relieved it failed—not because I oppose secure elections, but because I see it as the first step down a very familiar slippery slope.

Biddeford voters wait in line to drop off completed ballots

On the surface, voter ID feels like common sense. We show ID to board a plane, buy alcohol or tobacco, open a bank account, and any number of other activities… why not require an ID to vote? But we treat other constitutional rights very differently. 

Imagine if we required a license, registration, and liability insurance before anyone could legally keep a firearm—mirroring the rules we take for granted when driving a car. Many of us might consider that “common sense,” yet gun-rights advocates would immediately recognize it as a serious infringement on the Second Amendment, and a likely first step toward further restrictions.

Voting rights deserve the same scrutiny. Once we normalize new hurdles to casting a ballot, the next set of restrictions becomes easier to justify. We’ve seen this pattern elsewhere: voter ID laws show up alongside or just before cuts to same-day registration, drop boxes, and early or mail voting. 

The problem is that these laws target a threat that barely exists. A Brookings analysis of the Heritage Foundation’s own election-fraud database found just 1,561 proven cases over roughly 25 years of elections nationwide—minuscule fractions of a percent in states like Arizona and Pennsylvania. And in Maine? The investigation, meant to prove just how rampant voter fraud was, found two fraudulent votes in Maine since 1982.

In practical terms, you’re much more likely to be struck by lightning than to encounter in-person voter impersonation at your polling place. Any large-scale fraud that could swing an election would almost certainly come from insiders manipulating systems—not from individuals pretending to be someone else.

Meanwhile, the costs of “tightening” the rules are very real. Maine has one of the oldest populations in the country, with a median age over 45. Many of our neighbors are elderly, disabled, rural, or working multiple jobs. They rely on no-excuse absentee ballots, the ongoing absentee list, and help from family members to navigate the process. Question 1 would have narrowed who could request or return a ballot on someone’s behalf and cut back long-standing absentee options—changes that would hit homebound and low-income voters the hardest.

Other democracies have shown that you can increase access and maintain security. Countries such as Belgium and Brazil use electronic systems widely, and Estonia has offered nationwide internet voting for years, secured by a national digital ID card, while still producing auditable results. Their focus is on making it easier for every eligible citizen to vote, then rigorously verifying and auditing the count.

To me, the safest, most legitimate election is one where every eligible person has a fair, practical way to cast a ballot—and where results can be transparently checked. Question 1 would have moved Maine in the opposite direction: solving a nearly nonexistent fraud problem by making it harder for some of our most vulnerable neighbors to vote. I’m glad we said no this time. The challenge now is to remember why we did, and to keep defending access to the ballot whenever “common sense” is used as a pretext for chipping away at our rights.