Though Republicans enjoy full control over Maine’s lawmaking process, they’ve dropped a push to require certain photo identification in order to vote.

Though Maine Republicans were considering voter ID legislation at the beginning of the year, Democrats vociferously objected because the bill could prevent thousands of Mainers from voting, particularly elderly individuals. On Friday, Republicans acceded to those objections, striking the voter ID language from an election law bill. This is the second time voter ID has failed to pass the GOP-controlled Maine legislature. Last year, a voter ID bill failed in the Senate after first being passed by the House.

In 2011, half a dozen states passed similar voter ID measures, from Texas to Wisconsin to South Carolina. As a result, millions of poor, rural or minority voters could be barred from voting in the 2012 election, a level of disenfranchisement not seen since the Jim Crow era.

Maine Republicans were chastened during the 2011 session after they passed a bill to eliminate the state’s 38 year-old law allowing for Election Day registration, only to see their move overturned by a citizens veto in November. More than 60 percent of Mainers rebuked the legislature and voted to restore Election Day registration.

State Rep. Diane Russell (D) pointed to this episode to explain why Republicans opted against pursuing voter ID again this year. “Last November, 60% of Maine voters overwhelmingly rejected the Republican election suppression agenda,” Russell, who sits on the committee that removed the voter ID language, told ThinkProgress. “It is a real testament to Maine voters that Republicans decided against pursuing another failed election suppression policy by killing voter ID.”

Former state Sen. David Trahan (R), who served until December 2011, agreed with this take. “I do think that the referendum question–Question 1–changed that dynamic,” Trahan told the Maine Public Broadcasting Network. “And I think you’re going to see some gun-shy folks revisiting something to do with voting.”

Friday’s move likely puts voter ID to rest in Maine for 2012.

A 15-year-old law providing for public financing in the state of Maine may soon be undermined by Republican state lawmakers.

In 1996, Maine voters passed the Clean Elections Act, making it the first state in the country to have public financing for state elections. Since that time, state legislative and gubernatorial candidates have used public financing, as the Maine Public Broadcasting Network writes , to “discourage the use of special interest money out of state and, allow candidates to spend more time running for office instead of fundraising.” The system has been so successful that in 2010, “more than 80 percent of legislators used Clean Election money,” according to the Bangor Daily News.

Here’s how it works. Once candidates collect a certain number of $5 qualifying checks, they receive a set amount of funds – just under $5,500 for contested state representative races – to run their campaign. If their opponent or an outside group spends additional money, the “clean elections candidate” receives matching funds as well.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar matching funds provision in Arizona. As a result, Maine legislators agreed to revisit their state’s law and bring it into compliance.

However, Republicans are using the opportunity to try to undermine the state’s entire public financing system. Though a number of ideas have been proposed by the Maine Ethics Commission to bring the state’s program into compliance, Republicans rejected those proposals in a party-line vote yesterday. Instead, GOP lawmakers simply eliminated the matching funds provision without offering any alternatives to fill the void:

In a strict party line vote on Tuesday, Republican members of the Legislature’s Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee narrowly favored stripping the matching funds provision from the Maine Clean Election Act.

Maine lawmakers have been struggling since that court ruling with a way to address the elimination of matching funds and have debated two options put forth by the Maine Ethics Commission.

Under the first option, the state would pay candidates fixed amounts upfront — $7,716 for House candidates and $33,617 for Senate candidates, significantly more than the current allocations. Under the second, clean candidates could get extra payments by collecting additional $5 checks from private donors. In order to qualify for public funding in the first place, candidates need to collect a minimum number of such donations.

Republicans have rejected both.

State Rep. Diane Russell (D), one of the clean election law’s leading proponents, told ThinkProgress that the effort to roll back Maine’s public financing system could have national ramifications. “Maine is the model state,” said Russell. “If they kill public financing here, they put the stake in the heart nationally.”

The full legislature will take up the issue in January.

In apparent efforts to keep up with GOP efforts across the country, Maine Republicans keep trying — and keep failing — to enact laws that make it harder for Mainers to vote. Efforts to pass a stringent voter identification law failed in the state Senate this fall, and voters offered a strong rebuke at the polls Tuesday, shooting down a GOP attempt that would have ended same-day registration, even as conservative donors funneled $250,000 in undisclosed donations in attempt to uphold the law.

Ignoring those failures, Maine Republicans –including Gov. Paul LePage — have pledged to continue their fight to restrict voting rights and will revisit their voter ID bill when a new legislative session begins in January, the AP reports:

But after a voter ID bill that passed the House failed in the Senate this year, lawmakers decided to carry it over to the session that starts in January. And Republican Gov. Paul LePage believes the issue needs to be revisited, notwithstanding Tuesday’s vote, said spokeswoman Adrienne Bennett. [...]

The voter ID bill had more than 80 co-sponsors — all Republicans — when Rep. Richard Cebra introduced it.

The Naples Republican sees his proposal as a reasonable, constitutionally sound means to protect Maine elections from fraud. He also dismisses assertions that such laws deprive citizens of their right to vote.

Republican attempts to “protect…elections from fraud” continue to ring hollow, however, as such fraud is incredibly rare. But in Maine, where city and town clerks monitor elections, fraud is even more uncommon. According to the ACLU, the state has had only two cases of voter fraud at the polls in the past four decades, and a recent study on Maine’s student voting fraud — one of the main problems cited by state Republicans — found that the “problem” didn’t actually exist.

“I don’t think, in the entire time I’ve been working the polls, I don’t think anyone has ever come in and claimed to be someone they weren’t,” Harlan Baker, an election clerk in Portland, told ThinkProgress’ Scott Keyes last week. “I’ve never witnessed it.”