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Maine has become the second US state to disqualify Donald Trump from the 2024 primary ballot.
Democrat and Maine Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows 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 to stop lawmakers from certifying the vote.
Bellows suspended her decision until the state supreme court ruled on the matter.
The decision 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.
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 Dec. 19, making him the first candidate in US 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 criticized ballot challenges as “undemocratic.” The Colorado Republican Party filed its own Supreme Court appeal on Wednesday.
