Lewiston City Hall: The Aides Were Inside the Booth

Four parts. One room. The first file is Matt Walsh with the photograph, credit @SteveRob. The second half of that same file is a different angle of the city camera, played at ten times speed. The second file is the booth. The third file is the Maine Wire’s graphic. They are all on this page.

The photograph is Hannah Pingree in the center, days before early voting opened in Maine on October 13, 2026. She led the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future for Janet Mills from January 2019 until May 16, 2025, and she is running for governor. Walsh’s line over the picture is that she is the likely next Democratic governor, surrounded by NGO translators. Pingree is not in the body of the Maine Wire story. She is on his screen.

He puts Amran Osman on the left, in the blue covering. He says she received more than sixty thousand dollars for her NGO after the October 2023 Lewiston shooting, that the money was supposed to go to relatives of the victims, and that a lot of it was routed to NGOs instead. The Maine Community Foundation ran two pots. The victims-and-families fund paid $4,696,067 to 162 people. A separate broad-recovery fund paid $1,900,132 to 29 nonprofits, $65,522 each, and the foundation did not require a full report of how that money was spent. The Maine Wire’s December 2025 account says Osman started Generational Noor, that the foundation gave that group $65,000, that it was not registered to solicit charitable funds in Maine, and that it looks defunct. After the check, the group’s Instagram said it was opening an office on Canal Street, which the Wire identifies as Gateway Community Services’ Lewiston office. Gateway is on the same list of checks.

Front left is Safiya Khalid. Walsh says she worked with Gateway Community Services, and that whistleblowers have accused that group of Medicaid fraud. The Wire puts her at Gateway and then at the Community Organizing Alliance. Gateway’s MaineCare payments were suspended in December 2025. The department upheld the suspension in May 2026 and called it a credible allegation of fraud, after audits found about $1.1 million in overpayments from March 2021 through December 2022 and about $663,000 from 2015 through 2018. Gateway has denied the allegations. There is no finding in that record that Khalid billed the claims. The founder the Wire writes about is Abdullahi Ali, not her.

The tall man behind Pingree is Hussein Hirsi Ahmed. Walsh calls him the former finance minister of Jubaland, Somalia. Steve Robinson’s account is the same, and adds that Ahmed was a member of Somalia’s parliament from 2021 to 2023. On this cut Walsh then plays the city camera. A person in a green covering is leaned into a booth over a voter in a purple shirt. The banner on the clip says ten times speed, and the credit is The Maine Wire. Walsh says that figure is Ahmed, offering assistance, and that there is no reason to believe the translators are following the rules. The angle is overhead and sped up. It does not resolve a face. Robinson has also pointed at a man in a blue shirt, on a different stretch of footage, and called that man Ahmed. Those are two identifications. This frame only shows the green covering inside the booth.

Walsh’s closer on that file is that people who cannot speak English are voting, and that reading, writing, and speaking basic English is a requirement of citizenship, depending on age. The requirement he is pointing at is naturalization, 8 CFR §312.1. An applicant has to show ordinary English unless they are 50 with 20 years as a permanent resident, 55 with 15 years, or medically unable. It is not a rule for people born citizens, and it is not a rule at a Maine polling place. The rule at the booth is the next statute.

The second file is Lewiston City Hall, October 13, 2026. Early in-person voting. The city’s own camera, released under the Freedom of Access Act. The line on the picture credits @SteveRob and TheMaineWire.com. A woman dressed in black from head to toe is inside the booth row. She starts beside a woman in a patterned dress. She is then in the next booth with a man in a white cap, her back to the lens, between the camera and the ballot. A woman in a pink jacket walks the room and does not stop it. Other people at the same bank of booths are marking their own ballots. Walsh says the angle is not ideal, and then this: “although we can’t see exactly what’s going on, her movements would be consistent with touching the ballots and possibly even manipulating them.” This angle does not show the marks. It does not show a party line. It shows one aide moving from voter to voter inside the booths while the room is open and staff are in it. She is not identified as Osman, Khalid, or Ahmed.

The statute is 21-A M.R.S. §672. A voter who cannot read or mark a ballot because of a physical disability, illiteracy, or religious faith may request another person to read it or mark it according to the voter’s wishes. That person cannot be the voter’s employer, or an officer or agent of the voter’s union. The helper does not have to be a registered voter. When assisting, the aide may not tell the voter how to make the voter’s choices or otherwise influence the voter. The influence ban is §682. Inside the voting place, and on public property within 250 feet of the entrance, a person may not influence or attempt to influence another person’s decision on a candidate or a question that is on the ballot that day.

The Maine Wire prints a tighter list and calls it the rule. Translators are not allowed to offer assistance. They must wait until it is requested. They are not allowed to influence the voter’s choices. They are not allowed to mark up a ballot. They cannot approach or interrupt a voter who is already in the booth. The sentence Walsh reads off that page: “As is evident from the CCTV video, virtually every one of these rules was violated over and over again.” The wait-until-asked line and the stay-out-of-an-occupied-booth line are the Wire’s reading of §672. They are not the words in the statute. What the statute prints is a request, a mark made according to the voter’s wishes, and a ban on the aide choosing. After the stills spread, the city clerk, Kathy Montejo, started handing the Somali NGO staffers a printout of those rules. Steve Robinson’s account: an election warden, not the clerk, asked one interpreter to leave the immediate voting area for volunteering help. The person was not thrown out of the building.

The third file is the Wire’s October 30 graphic. The headline on it is “Election fraud: DOJ investigating Somali translators caught on CCTV coaching migrant voters.” U.S. Attorney Andrew Benson’s sentence, given to The Robinson Report, is not that headline. “We review all evidence concerning complaints of voter intimidation and election interference, including the video from Lewiston’s early voting at City Hall.” He added that the office will not tolerate threats to the integrity of elections and will work with the Attorney General and the Secretary of State. The Bangor Daily News asked the next day. A spokesperson confirmed the footage is under “review” and would not say the interpreters are under investigation. No charges have been filed off these tapes.

The Wire’s count is the Wire’s count. About 140 hours, starting October 13. Dozens of instances. More than 200 apparently non-English-speaking Somali voters assisted by a handful of NGO staffers who stayed in the room through most of early voting. The same piece calls that an industrial-scale ballot-stuffing scheme and party-line coaching for Democrats. That is the characterization. The Bangor Daily News noted that Robinson had, at that point, reviewed about 20 percent of the footage. On October 20, reporter Jon Fetherston said he had seen translators “talking to people and pointing at the ballots,” and “a couple of people actually touching the ballots.” Pointing is not the marks. The Wire says other stretches of the 140 hours do show a translator stepping into a booth while the voter steps aside. That footage is not one of these three files. The Wire’s account of Mayor Carl Sheline is that he moved to keep photojournalists out of the room after the stills spread. The city’s own cameras were not part of that limit.

What the four parts add up to is an aide already inside one booth and then the next, the paper hidden, and nobody in a city jacket stepping in. §672 is a voter who cannot read the ballot and asks for a hand. The DOJ headline is ahead of the sentence Benson actually gave. The review is real. The charges are not. The check to Generational Noor is a real check. The Gateway case is a suspension and a denial, not a verdict against the woman in the photograph. The green covering is Walsh’s identification. The marks are not on these angles.