(BBC News) Maine’s top election official said her “sacred obligation” to uphold the law drove the ruling to remove Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 election ballot.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows cited the US Constitution’s insurrection clause to remove Trump, noting his role in the 2021 US Capitol riot.
The Democrat told the BBC she was hopeful the US Supreme Court will settle the issue.
The Trump campaign has vowed to appeal the controversial decision.
Two states, Maine and Colorado, have banned the former president from the electoral ballot. Both decisions are on hold, however, until legal challenges make their way through the courts.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, has described both Maine and Colorado’s decisions as election meddling. He said on Thursday that the rulings were “a hostile assault on American democracy.”
Trump’s opponents for the Republican nomination and some legal experts also criticized the ruling, but Bellows maintained that she followed the law and the evidence presented to her.
Bellows says in her order, published on Thursday, that Trump must be removed from the state’s Republican primary ballot because of the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. She told the BBC that her “political affiliation or prior experience” played no role in the decision.
This section of the constitutional amendment, which is historically tied to the end of the US Civil War, prevents anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding federal office. Bellows’ order cites Trump’s efforts to push a months-long “false narrative of election fraud” ahead of the January 6 riot as justification for his removal.