Maine Secretary of State Claims Politics Played 'No Role' in Booting Trump Off Ballot

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

52% : "President Trump held a rally near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, in which he made statements encouraging his supporters to march to the Capitol, where Congress was certifying the results of the presidential election.
46% : The unprecedented ruling makes Colorado the first and only state to disqualify President Trump from appearing on a state primary ballot.
32% : However, the judge dismissed the lawsuit by finding that the 14th Amendment didn't apply to the presidency and ordered the state secretary to put President Trump on the primary ballot.
31% : Even though President Trump said in his Jan. 6 speech that protesters should "peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard," his critics have seized on a portion of his remarks where he said, "We fight like hell" and "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore" as a call for violence.
27% : It also makes President Trump the first candidate in U.S. history to be declared ineligible to run for the White House.
25% : Critics of her decision have pointed out that President Trump has not been found guilty of the crime of insurrection.
23% : She cited the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol as justification for her decision, arguing that President Trump "used a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters and direct them to the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power.
22% : While President Trump called for the day's events to be peaceful, a group of people breached the Capitol, leading to a violent confrontation with law enforcement.
21% : "The left-leaning group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued on behalf of several Colorado voters to block President Trump from appearing on the ballot.
19% : President Trump, who has denied such allegations, has not been charged with insurrection.
19% : While Ms. Bellows has been accused of making a politically-driven decision to interfere in the election, she denied that her decision to disqualify President Trump from the ballot was political.
8% : Ms. Bellows' decision to bar President Trump from the Maine ballot on 14th Amendment grounds followed a similar decision by the Colorado Supreme Court, which the Trump team has also criticized as is set to appeal to the nation's highest court.
7% : The Colorado Supreme Court then ruled on Dec. 19 that President Trump is ineligible to appear on the state's primary ballot, citing the lower court's finding "by clear and convincing evidence that President Trump engaged in insurrection as those terms are used in Section Three" of the 14th Amendment.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.