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TRANSCRIPT:
Shenna Bellows is Maine's Secretary of State.
She has just made an important decision.
"I qualified Donald Trump for the ballot. But under Maine law, any registered voter can bring a challenge. And that's in fact, what happened. There were three challenges. One of those challenges was brought by two former Republican state senators and a former Democratic state senator. And I was required by the law to hold a hearing within five days and then to issue a decision five days after the hearing is closed, which happened when all the parties had submitted all of their briefs to me. So this is something that I did not choose to do, but that I was obligated to do under Maine law and the Constitution."
Ms Bellow's ruling means that Donald Trump cannot be on the state's ballot in next year's US presidential primary election, which would decide the Republican party's candidate for the White House.
She says the decision is based on his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"I'm mindful that no Secretary of State has ever deprived a candidate of ballot access under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but no presidential candidate has ever engaged in an insurrection under Section 3 of 14th. ... The weight of the evidence made clear that Mr. Trump was aware of the tinder laid by his multi-month efforts to delegitimise the 2020 election results, and he then chose to light a match."
Nick Riccardi is a political analyst and journalist based in Denver, Colorado.
He says Colorado made a similar ruling earlier in December.
"Tonight, we have another blockbuster ruling on whether President, former President Donald Trump, can continue to run for his old job. The secretary of state in May, a Democrat, ruled that he cannot because he violated the 14th Amendment's prohibition on those who engage in insurrection from holding office during January sixth when there was an attack on the U-S Capitol. This was the first time in history an election official ruled that that measure, which was added after the Civil War, would prevent someone from running for the presidency. And it comes one week after the Colorado Supreme Court issued a very similar ruling saying that Trump wasn't eligible to be on the Colorado ballot."
The former president and his supporters have condemned both decisions, calling it a partisan witch-hunt, according to a statement on his website.
"The Maine Secretary of State is a former A-C-L-U attorney, a virulent leftist and a hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat who has decided to interfere in the presidential election on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden. We are witnessing, in real-time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter."
So does this mean Mr Trump is now disqualified from running for the office of President of the United States?
Notre Dame Law School Law Professor Derek Muller says that is not necessarily the case.
"The Trump campaign is expected some time, if I had to guess probably early next week, to file its appeal as well for the Supreme Court to take the case. And again, I think the fact that the Colorado Supreme Court has stayed its decision until January 4th and will let him appear on the ballot even after that, if there's an appeal pending means that he probably will be on the ballot and we'll let this play out over the next several weeks."
It is unclear if there will be more challenges in other states.
Michigan's top court has declined to hear a case seeking to disqualify him from that state's presidential primary ballot.
Nick Riccardi says Mr Trump is still on the ballot in Maine and Colorado pending the challenge to the Republican-dominated U-S Supreme Court.
He says the US is in unfamiliar territory.
"And it's the U-S Supreme Court that's going to make the final decision whether Trump can stay on the ballot in those two cases and indeed all the other states in the nation. They've never before ruled on this measure. They've never before ruled on whether it applies to Trump and whether it would prevent him from being president again."
