Maine business should join effort to end foreign interference in our elections

Ronda Beazley

The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set newsroom policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.

Warren Valdmanis is a partner at a Portland-based private equity business and a member of the Leadership Now Project. Fletcher Kittredge is founder and CEO of GWI, a Maine fiber infrastructure company.

Just two years ago, we in Maine celebrated two centuries of statehood — two centuries of Mainers making local decisions for ourselves. Maine has always had an independent streak, especially with regards to politics. While Maine enjoyed the third-highest voter turnout rate in the nation in 2020, it is also one of a shrinking number of purple states whose voters tend to chart an independent course. Sadly, that independence is increasingly endangered by an avalanche of outside influence and political spending.

Maine has a big problem with political spending. In Maine’s 2020 U.S. Senate election, outside groups and the campaigns spent nearly $200 million to influence the outcome, shattering Maine’s previous campaign spending records and diluting the voice of our voters. Perhaps more troubling still, Hydro-Quebec, a company solely owned by a foreign government, spent more than $22 million in support of the Central Maine Power corridor — you almost certainly saw the ads on television.

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