Outgoing Maine GOP chairman Charlie Webster plans to investigate claims that “dozens of black people” voted in rural Maine towns on November 6th.
Webster first mentioned his suspicions during a lengthy interview last week with Dan Carrigan of WCSH-TV in Portland, Maine.
“In some parts of the state, there were dozens of black people who came in to vote,” Webster said. “Nobody in town knew them.”
In a subsequent phone interview Wednesday with Bangor Daily News, Webster detailed his plans to root out the alleged fraud saying that he plans to send “several thousand” postcards with a photo of the State House to the addresses of voters who registered on election day.
“They’ll go out in first-class mail. I don’t expect people to respond to the question. The concept behind this is to see if they are returned. This is a reasonably inexpensive effort by me to settle the question” of whether outsiders came to Maine to vote fraudulently.
“One of the reasons people think there’s a problem is that they don’t know these people when they come in to vote. Several pockets in the state had unusually high numbers of new voters, and the selectmen and town clerks did not know who they are.”
Webster denies that his investigation is racially motivated.
“It’s not about being black or Spanish or Chinese. Every election I hear that hundreds of unfamiliar people come in to vote. It’s unfortunate that people will use the issue of being black. If you lived in a small town, you would know that if [an unfamiliar] black person or Chinese person comes to vote, it would seem odd.”
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