AUGUSTA – Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster said Friday he was “concerned” about 19 voters who used a hotel address to register on Election Day in 2004.

Webster has been an out-spoken supporter of the recently passed law to eliminate Maine’s Election Day registration, now the subject of a people’s veto referendum.

But the 19 voters appear to be medical students of a school on Grand Cayman Island that were evacuated due to a hurricane, according to a spokeswoman at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine. St. Joe’s used to have a partnership with St. Matthew’s University Medical School of Grand Cayman and likely helped some students in need relocate, Charmaine Daniels of St. Joe’s said in an interview.

Webster, who issued a press release Friday morning, did not allege fraud. But he said Mainers “should be very concerned that 19 individuals, who all listed the same hotel address, were able to register to vote and cast a ballot on a busy Election Day.”

One of the arguments made by supporters of the new law that would eliminate same-day registration is that municipal clerks need time to scrutinize new registrants for potential fraud. In this case, it likely wouldn’t have mattered, if all the registrants, who were all U.S. citizens, claimed Maine as their residence.

“Their facility in Grand Cayman was wiped out by a hurricane and so what they had to do was reorganize quickly obviously so they brought students from Grand Cayman,” Daniels said.

St. Joe’s no longer has the same relationship with St. Matthews, she added.

 

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