On Thursday, August 20, Bobby Charles stood in front of a room of young Republicans in Arundel and told them what he plans to do about Maine's election in November.
He plans to call the White House border czar and ask him to send federal agents to where you vote.
"I'm going to ask Tom — three or four weeks before the election, maybe three — I'm going to make an appeal for ICE and marshals to be at our voting booths."
Then he added a punchline for the room:
"Do you think the illegals who are being paid money are going to like that?"
The audio was obtained exclusively by the Bangor Daily News. The "Tom" is Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, who Charles described to the room as an old friend from their years together on Fox News.
There is no evidence that anyone is being paid to vote in Maine. Charles offered none.
And the thing he says he's going to ask for is against the law.
The law is not ambiguous, and it is not new
There is a federal statute on the books — 18 U.S.C. § 592, written in the 1800s — that makes it a crime for any federal officer to bring or keep "troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held." The only exception is if armed force is genuinely needed to fight off an attack on the United States.
The punishment is spelled out in the same paragraph: a fine, or up to five years in prison, or both — plus being "disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust."
The Brennan Center for Justice looked at exactly this question last month and put it in one sentence: "Sending armed federal agents, including those from ICE, to election sites is illegal." The statute covers any "person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States," not just soldiers — which is what makes it reach federal law enforcement.
Maine's Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, was blunter.
"ICE and federal law enforcement are prohibited from being at the polls on Election Day. Bobby Charles can call whoever he wants, but he can't change the Constitution or the law."
Even the Trump administration isn't claiming it can do this. The Department of Homeland Security pointed a reporter back to what Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at his confirmation hearing in March: agents would go to a polling place only in response to a specific threat, and never for "intimidation."
Charles's campaign did not deny he said it. His campaign manager, Dale Crafts Jr., said Charles "will do everything legally possible to prevent illegal voting in Maine." That answer skips the actual problem. The thing Charles described is not legally possible. That's the whole story.
The same day, in a different town, he said he doesn't even know Trump
Here is what makes this more than a bad answer at a small event.
August 20 was a busy day for Bobby Charles. In Arundel, in front of a room of party activists, he said he'd personally phone Trump's border czar and get ICE to Maine's polling places.
That same day, at a campaign stop in Gorham, he made a point of telling reporters that the governor's race is "not about national politics." And he said this:
"I do not know President Trump. I have never met him. But, I will work with him. I will also stand up against him if he opposes something Maine needs. I am running to serve one group of people: the people of Maine."
Four days later, Vice President JD Vance came to Brewer and told the crowd to vote for Charles. Charles didn't go. His spokesperson said he was already booked to meet with people in Maine's addiction and recovery community, and had no plans to see Vance at any point during the trip.
So the version of Bobby Charles that reporters got is a man who has never met the president, doesn't want to talk about national politics, and can't make it to a rally being held for him. The version the Young Republicans got, the same calendar day, is a man on a first-name basis with the border czar who intends to ask him for a favor involving Maine's polling places.
One of those two men is the one asking Mainers for their vote.
Homan was already here
The favor may not even have been necessary.
Homan was in Maine on August 18 — two days before the Arundel event — eating dinner in Presque Isle, about 15 miles from the nearest Canadian border crossing. Earlier that day he told a border seminar in New York that he was heading to Maine to "find out what the hell is going on up there."
In a video that a Maine Republican state representative posted himself, Homan promised "a lot more enforcement action" in Maine, and turned to the people here on Temporary Protected Status — a program that lets people stay when war or disaster makes going home unsafe.
"A lot of TPS people in Maine. They're not going to be there much longer either now that the Supreme Court said we can end TPS."
There are 715 people with that status in Maine, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. That is the entire population Homan was calling "a lot." Nationwide the figure is about 1.3 million.
This is the same national push Charles has been cheering for a year. Last summer he posted that Florida's Everglades detention camp deserved "kudos" and that "We need our own version in Maine", then ran a petition on it. Florida shut that camp down in June, less than a year after it opened, having spent $1.2 billion on it. He also wants to repeal Maine's law keeping state law enforcement out of federal immigration operations. And he has spent his campaign insisting a Somali-born Maine legislator isn't really American, which is where a lot of this started.
The fraud he keeps describing has never shown up
Charles's pitch rests on a claim: that noncitizens are voting in Maine in numbers that matter. He has been making it for a year.
In an August 2025 column he wrote that Maine's elections were battered by "proven allegations of double voter cards, illegals with driver's licenses and permits," accused Democrats of trying "to legalize voting by illegal aliens," and said the voter ID referendum had been "fraudulently interfered with by the shameless Mills Mafia." He urged Mainers to "send a message to the corrupt Democrat Machine in Augusta" by voting for that referendum. They didn't. It failed 64% to 36% — 315,008 votes against, 175,751 for — losing in Portland and in rural western Maine alike.
The evidence has not improved since. Bellows said this week:
"Despite many allegations from multiple sources, no one has presented me with evidence that there is a specific non-citizen on Maine's voting rolls that has voted illegally."
The national picture is the same. The Brennan Center's review of the actual cases found election officials referred about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes counted — 0.0001 percent. A New York Times survey of the 2016 election turned up two possible instances out of 137.7 million voters. Florida screened a list of 180,000 suspected noncitizens and ended up removing 85 names and convicting one person.
The one real recent case cuts against him too. In New Jersey, about 6,600 noncitizens were wrongly registered between June 2023 and June 2024 — because of a software error in the state's motor vehicle system, which was found and fixed in June 2024. Fewer than 400 of them cast a ballot in three years of elections. As Keith Ingram, Texas's former elections director, put it: "noncitizen voting is a very small problem, if it's a problem at all, and this doesn't change that opinion at all."
A software bug is not a conspiracy, and it is certainly not people "being paid money."
We went through the administration's own best evidence earlier this month — a seven-page Census Bureau report with no named authors, claiming 24,000 noncitizen votes in 2020. That works out to less than 0.019 percent of the voters it checked, and the report has no way to know who any of them voted for.
What armed agents at a polling place actually do
Set aside whether anyone is voting illegally. Ask what the proposal accomplishes.
An ICE agent posted outside a polling place cannot tell who is a citizen by looking. What that agent can do is change who walks in the door. A green-card holder with a citizen spouse. A naturalized citizen who remembers January's ICE surge in southern Maine. A grandmother who doesn't want a scene. None of them are voting illegally. All of them would think twice.
That is not a side effect of the plan. Charles said so himself in Arundel — the point, in his telling, is that certain people won't "like that." Scaring people away from the polls isn't a flaw in this idea. It's how it would work.
Maine isn't the only place this is being tried. In New Hampshire, federal officials are set to monitor polls in the state's two largest cities this fall, and Gov. Kelly Ayotte said she'd "welcome anyone" — in the same press conference where she vowed to fight the national Democratic Party for bumping New Hampshire out of its first-in-the-nation primary slot.
The bottom line
Bobby Charles told supporters on August 20 that he intends to ask Trump's border czar for ICE agents and federal marshals at Maine's voting booths — something a federal law has made a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, since the 1800s. He justified it with a claim that people are being paid to vote illegally, for which he offered no evidence and none exists. Maine's Secretary of State says that in all the years of allegations, nobody has ever shown her a single noncitizen on Maine's rolls who cast a ballot. The same day Charles said it, he told reporters he doesn't know Donald Trump and has never met him.
Source
Michael Shepherd, "Bobby Charles said he'll ask Donald Trump's border czar to send ICE to Maine polls," Bangor Daily News, August 26, 2026. Photo: Linda Coan O'Kresik / BDN.
