Maine Gov. Paul LePage claims election not legitimate until voter ID laws passed

Maine Gov. Paul LePage claimed Tuesday that elections in his state and in the US as a whole couldn’t be considered legitimate until voter ID laws are passed.

LePage, a prominent supporter of Donald Trump, was asked on Maine radio station WVOM about the Republican presidential nominee’s recent claims that the election is being “rigged” against him. Trump has called the election “one big fix” and warned of “large scale voter fraud,” though there is no evidence to support his claims.

Asked if he was confident that the election in Maine would be clean, LePage replied, “No. I am not confident we’re going to have a clean election in Maine and I’ll tell you why. The left, the Democratic party, insists on not having IDs. And will people from the cemetery be voting? Yes. All around the country. The media and the Democratic party want everybody to vote whether they’re citizens or not.”

LePage went on to say that states should provide photo IDs to residents and added that it wasn’t “a big issue.” He added that there are counties in the US where more votes are cast than there are citizens in the county.

“You gotta have photo IDs when you cash checks, you gotta have photo IDs every place you go,” LePage said. “In fact, I don’t know how many times you gotta take your license out of your wallet to show it to people. And so until we do that, I don’t think that elections in the state of Maine or in the United States are legitimate. I mean, we know that there are counties in this country that get more votes than there are citizens in their county, so what’s that tell you?”

The governor did not cite any specific counties to support his point.

Other Republicans, like Sens. Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey have publicly refuted Trump’s claims. “Our elections may not always be completely perfect, but they are legitimate, they have integrity and everyone needs to respect the outcome,” Toomey said Monday night. A spokesperson for House Speaker Paul Ryan said last week that Ryan was “fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”