Maine disqualifies Trump from 2024 primary ballot

Maine’s top election official has disqualified Donald Trump from the State ballot in next year’s US presidential primary election, becoming the second State to bar the former president for his role in the attack on the Capitol.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, concluded that Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024, incited an insurrection when he spread false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and then urged his supporters to march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to stop lawmakers from certifying the vote.

Bellows suspended her decision until the State Supreme Court ruled on the matter.

The decision on Thursday came after a group of former Maine lawmakers said that Trump should be disqualified based on a provision of the US Constitution that bars people from holding office if they engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” after previously swearing an oath to the United States.

The ruling, which can be appealed to a State court, applies only to the March primary election, but it could affect Trump’s status for the November general election.

It likely will add to pressure on the US Supreme Court to resolve questions about Trump’s eligibility nationwide under the constitutional provision known as Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Trump has been indicted in both a federal case and in Georgia for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election but he has not been charged with insurrection related to the Jan. 6 attack. He leads opinion polls by a large margin in the race for the Republican nomination in 2024.

Colorado’s top court disqualified Trump from the State primary ballot on December 19, making him the first candidate in history to be deemed ineligible for the presidency for engaging in insurrection.

Trump has vowed to appeal the Colorado ruling to the Supreme Court and criticised ballot challenges as “undemocratic”. The Colorado Republican Party filed its own Supreme Court appeal on Wednesday.

Similar attempts to disqualify Trump in other states have been rejected. The top court in Michigan, a pivotal battleground state in the general election, declined on Wednesday to hear an appeal on Trump’s eligibility to hold office.