Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows — home swatted hours after her address was posted online (December 2023)

What happened

On December 28, 2023, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows issued a decision under the 14th Amendment finding Donald Trump ineligible for the state's Republican primary ballot. The next day, December 29, at about 8:15 p.m., a man called Maine State Police claiming he had broken into Bellows's home in Manchester. Officers responded. Neither Bellows nor her husband were at the residence. There was no intruder.

Bellows stated publicly that the call was a swatting attempt designed to intimidate her, and that her home address had been posted online in the hours after the ballot decision.

How it started

The address publication preceded the swatting call. According to Bellows's own public statements and reporting in CNN, NBC News, and WBUR, a conservative activist posted Bellows's home address on social media after the ballot decision came out. Within roughly 24 hours, a false report sent law enforcement to that address.

The Maine State Police investigated the swatting call as a separate criminal matter. The doxxing and swatting wave around the December 2023 / January 2024 ballot decisions ultimately included Trump-case judges, several state attorneys general, and other election officials. A California teenager, Alan Filion, pleaded guilty in late 2024 to making hundreds of swatting calls nationwide and was sentenced to four years in federal prison in 2025, though the Bellows call has not been publicly tied to him.

Why this case matters

State-level election officials are a category that almost no specific state privacy statute covers. The federal Lieu Act covers federal judges. Daniel's Law in New Jersey and analogs in a handful of other states cover police, prosecutors, and judges. Secretaries of state, election administrators, and most state-level civil officials sit outside the formal coverage list.

That gap matters operationally. Bellows's address was reachable through standard channels. When the political moment came, an activist published it within hours. The swatting call followed within hours after that. The chain ran end-to-end without ever leaving the public web.

What this means for you

For any state official whose decisions can attract a national news cycle — election administrators, state judges, AGs, prosecutors, school-board members in some districts — the Bellows case is the practical demonstration. The address-by-name lookup is fast. The publication is fast. The swatting follows.

The legal protections that exist were written for cops and judges first. Election officials can, and should, push for state-level coverage. In the meantime, the upstream piece — broker removal — is the only piece that closes the lookup before the political moment arrives.

For more on the swatting threat shape and what to do about it, see /swatting.

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