Recently, we’ve been receiving reports from people in Lewiston that the Maine Wire has been targeting citizens of color attempting to peacefully cast their ballots. This is part of a broader pattern of harassment, particularly of the Somali community in Lewiston, that has now reached the point where elected officials, state agencies, and law enforcement can no longer ignore the problem.
This is part of a larger pattern. For the past few years, the Maine Wire has repeatedly targeted people of color for harassment and intimidation simply for going about their lives in our community. It’s a pattern that has its roots in one of the darkest chapters in US history – and we need to see it in that context, and act accordingly before it gets to the point where we can no longer take effective action against it.
I’ll start with what’s been happening in Lewiston over the last few weeks. During early voting at Lewiston City Hall, the Maine Wire has been photographing and filming voters of color at close range without their consent; badgering voters as they enter, asking them whether they speak English, who is providing their interpretation assistance, and so on (they’ve also been posting about it on social media – I won’t link to their posts, but they are easy to find.) The implication, of course, is that these voters are doing something wrong, and the Wire’s public presence and online statements are clearly oriented towards intimidating people from exercising their constitutional rights.
It’s not surprising, then, that citizens of color have begun to feel uncomfortable voting, with some going to voting locations and then turning around for fear of being targeted, particularly on social media or through the exposure of their personal information.
Those fears don’t come only out of the recent reported harassment. They’re grounded in a strong, long-term pattern of behavior. Here are a few examples:
The Maine Wire’s Jon Fetherston has repeatedly stationed himself outside Lewiston’s Masjidu Salaam mosque during Friday prayers, confronting worshippers with accusations of fraud and posting their reactions online. On Eid, he waved what he calls his “Sword of Truth” while a cameraman photographed worshippers. The presence of Fetherston and others has been so intimidating to community members that they’ve felt compelled to organize a safety team outside the mosque to help worshippers enter and leave without confrontation.
As part of its ongoing campaign against immigrant health care workers, a Maine Wire operative took a photo of a teenage boy holding some money outside the mosque and splashed his face all over their social media. The Wire’s parent organization the Maine Policy Institute put a life-sized cutout of the boy (whose parents told a reporter he was afraid to leave the family’s home) on display at the gubernatorial debate it sponsored.
Former Lewiston City Councilor Safiya Khalid has described how the Maine Wire was doxxing Somali residents, with their names and addresses posted online. At one point, Wire operatives posted a video of a barely clothed nonverbal man with severe disabilities across the internet without his family’s permission.
Again and again, the Maine Wire targets include people who are not able or safe to defend themselves against the attention being directed at them. Taken together, these incidents show why the conduct at City Hall is so alarming. People of color are singled out, treated as suspicious without evidence, filmed, and exposed to an online audience. People who have seen what happens outside their mosque have reason to worry when they encounter the same cameras on their way to vote.
While the Maine Wire, as a media organization, generally engages in more direct harassment under the auspices of the first amendment, its parent organization is working on a longer game and a veneer of respectability. It’s a place in institutions where many people would never expect to find it – like Waynflete, the private school in Portland. Waynflete partnered with the Maine Wire’s parent organization the Maine Policy Institute to co-lead the “Can We?” Project, bringing high school students together to discuss politics. It is outrageous to allow an organization targeting vulnerable members of the community to have any role in educating children about “civil discourse.”
And the Wire/MPI are also allegedly looking to directly influence elections – not just frighten voters. Recently, a video (captured by the doorbell camera of a candidate outside whose home the Wire/MPI’s Jon Fetherston was camped out) appears to show Fetherston discussing election strategy with Republican candidates in ways that raise concerns about improper electioneering.
All of these clearly raise the question about whether the Maine Wire and its allies are working to influence the election outside the safeguards of our laws.
Where this all leads – what we know from history
This is all awful in itself. When compared with past attempts to subvert democratic values, that awfulness is thrown into even sharper relief.
We know that in the U.S, harassment and voter intimidation targeted at voters of color right before Election Day are nothing new. Some of the first federal laws taking aim at these problems were passed during Reconstruction, after the Civil War, when newly freed Black men had just won the right to vote. America’s future as a multi-racial state depended on Black voters being able to get safely to the polls, as they constituted a significant portion of the electorate across the South.
Southern white supremacists viewed this as a threat, but approached their efforts to keep Black Americans from exercising their voting rights with an eye toward plausible deniability. As Allen W. Trelease outlines in his classic, exhaustive book on the subject, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan’s early activities included what its members presented as practical jokes, disguising themselves to look like ghosts.
As the Klan spread, its tactics became more and more violent, escalating into terrorism, including murders and political assassinations. KKK groups often centered the timing and location of their activities on politically important districts ahead of elections.
Scaring enough people away from voting could allow its favored candidates to win. Then its political allies, once in power, could dismantle the protections designed to safeguard Black voters, further tightening their grip on power. Across the South, white supremacist violence helped destroy Reconstruction and lay the groundwork for the disenfranchisement of Black citizens for generations.
Too many people made the mistake of underestimating the Klan and the violence it would unleash. Governors and other state and local elected officials sometimes hesitated to use the full extent of their legal powers to stop intimidation before it got out of control. The consequences included the destruction of the South’s new interracial democracy just a few years after it was born.
Just a few decades ago, in the America most of us grew up in, these comparisons might have seemed far-fetched. But that was before the January 6th insurrection and the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti and—right here in Maine—Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Those of us with children in the Lewiston elementary schools remember this January, when classrooms were missing so many children because their families did not feel safe sending them outside.
If citizens of color do not feel safe to vote in Maine, we all lose. Along with some very important individual races, voters in Maine will also decide on the makeup of the legislature that gets to elect the Secretary of State and the Attorney General—two of the most important people who safeguard our democracy.
We do not want Maine to learn again how intimidation can undermine democracy while people in positions of power hesitate to act. We need to act now, while the threat is containable and good people wield the power necessary to take action.
What we can do
First, election officials need to protect the places where people exercise their right to vote. The Lewiston City Clerk should make the rules governing the voting area clear and work with the appropriate officials to stop interference and remove anyone whose conduct warrants removal under the law.
Several areas deserve immediate investigation:
- Voter intimidation or coercion (52 U.S.C. §10307(b)).
- Improper political influence at the polls (21-A M.R.S. §682).
- Interference with voting or ballot marking (21-A M.R.S. §674).
- Violations of applicable photography and access rules (21-A M.R.S. §683).
- Prohibited campaign advertising during absentee voting (21-A M.R.S. §753-B(8)).
- Harassment, including whether grounds exist for a protective order (17-A M.R.S. §506-A; 5 M.R.S. §4651).
- Possible campaign-finance and reporting violations (21-A M.R.S. §1003; §1017).
- Whether anyone intentionally helped commit an underlying crime (17-A M.R.S. §57).
Which laws apply, and what action is warranted, will depend on the evidence. That is why an investigation is necessary.
The public officials who can take action include:
- The City Clerk and election officials: Remove the Maine Wire to ensure voters can exercise their rights without intimdation
- The Maine Secretary of State: Determine whether state election law is being followed and whether corrective instructions are needed before Election Day.
- Law enforcement, the Maine Attorney General, and district attorneys: Investigate possible criminal election-law violations, intimidation, and interference.
- The Maine Ethics Commission or other appropriate campaign-finance authority: Examine campaign expenditures, undisclosed payments, and reporting.
- The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division: Investigate possible violations of federal voter-intimidation protections.
Most important, however, are regular people, like you and me. Democracy is not a set of rules or an idea. It rests on the principle that all power comes from us, the people. If we decide that it is unacceptable for an organization like this to operate this way, well outside the boundaries of basic human decency, we can insist that it stop. If, however, we decide—simply through inaction—that this behavior can be tolerated, it will continue and likely get worse.
We have to make our voices heard by people in positions of formal power within our government. We will not tolerate this behavior, and we expect them to investigate and take action using the full power available to them by law to prevent it from going any further. It is on us to support our community members safely exercising their right to vote.
There is a long, distinguished line of American patriots who took tremendous risks and made extraordinary sacrifices to create the country that is now in danger. Probably the vast majority of us never thought about the trajectory of our lives in terms of needing to apply the lessons learned during perilous times, like the battle against white supremacist terrorism during Reconstruction. And yet it is our most sacred responsibility to all the generations that follow us that we show no hesitation in this moment in taking immediate and decisive action.
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