By PATRICK WHITTLE

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — Authorities in Maine are investigating an allegation that dozens of unmarked ballots that were to be used in this November’s election arrived inside a woman’s Amazon order.

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The town of Ellsworth reported to the state last week that it was missing a shipment of 250 absentee ballots, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said Monday. That happened the same day a woman in a town roughly 40 miles away reported finding bundles of ballots — 250 in all — wrapped in plastic inside the box that contained her delivery from Amazon.

The secretary of state’s law enforcement division is investigating the discovery with assistance from the FBI and state authorities, Bellows said during a news conference at the state Capitol. She declined to identify the person who reported the ballots inside the delivery box, except to confirm she lived in the town of Newburgh.

“I have full confidence that law enforcement will determine who is responsible, and any bad actor will be held accountable,” she said, suggesting there could be other examples.

“This year, it seems that there may have been attempts to interrupt the distribution of ballots and ballot materials,” Bellows said, declining to elaborate.

The investigation into the wayward ballots is taking place less than a month before the state’s Nov. 4 election and with absentee voting already underway. The ballot includes a Republican-backed initiative that would implement a photo ID requirement for voters, limit the use of drop boxes and make changes to the state’s absentee voting system.

It also comes as Bellows, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor in 2026, is clashing with the U.S. Department of Justice over its requests in numerous states for detailed voter roll information. The department has sued several states that have refused to turn over the data, including Maine.

Bellows has been a target of Republican ire in Maine since she removed President Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 presidential primary ballot under the Constitution’s insurrection clause. Trump appeared on the ballot after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened.

The story of the misplaced ballots has spread widely on social media since a conservative website in the state first reported it last week and has reignited claims by conservatives that Maine’s elections need to be more secure. Some prominent Republicans have used it to promote the need for the election-related ballot initiative.

“What this means is that Mainers need to turn out in force, and every single person that supports voter ID and securing our elections needs to get out and vote between now and Nov. 4 to ensure that we secure our elections,” said Republican state Rep. Laurel Libby, a supporter of the voter ID initiative.

Maine’s top Republicans in the Democratic-majority Legislature sent a letter last week to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel requesting an investigation into the claims. The letter states that the person who received the package, whom it does not name, informed their town office about the discovery.

Officials with the Justice Department and town of Newburgh declined to comment. Amazon said the company is cooperating with Maine’s investigation.

“Based on our initial findings, it appears that this package was tampered with outside of our fulfillment and delivery network, and not by an Amazon employee or partner,” the company said in a statement to The Associated Press.

29th April 1965: American folk pop singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan. (Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images)

Among Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, Minnesota’s own Bob Dylan has been one of the most generous in sharing outtakes from his career.

On Halloween, he’ll release “Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through the Open Window, 1956-1963,” which digs into his earliest days. The eight CD box set — highlights of which will also be available as two CD and four LP sets — follows his move from Minneapolis to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early ’60s. The collection includes rare Columbia Records outtakes and other recordings made at club dates, in tiny informal gatherings, in friends’ apartments and at jam sessions in long-gone musicians’ hangouts. The recordings come from new tape sources and many have never been presented in any form.

Bob Dylan’s “Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through the Open Window, 1956-1963” includes previously unreleased performances from the Minnesota native’s early career. It’s due out Oct. 31, 2025. (Courtesy of Columbia Records)

As such, “Through the Open Window” includes a handful of numbers recorded in his home state. The box opens with “Let the Good Times Roll,” recorded on Dec. 24, 1956 at Terlinde Music Shop in St. Paul. Other selections include “I Got a New Girl” (May 1959; home of Ric Kangas, Hibbing), “Jesus Christ” (Sept. 1960; Dylan’s home, Minneapolis), “I Ain’t Got No Home” (May 13, 1961; Coffman Theater at the University of Minnesota), “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” and “Devilish Mary” (May 1961; Minneapolis), “Long Time Gone” (Aug. 11, 1962; home of Dave Whitaker, Minneapolis) and “Eternal Circle,” “Liverpool Gal” and “West Memphis” (July 17, 1963; home of Tony Glover, Minneapolis).

Also included is a seven-song concert captured on Dec. 22, 1961 at the Minneapolis home of Bonnie Beecher.

“Of that time and those places, this collection is just a fragment,” writes author and historian Sean Wilentz in his 125-page liner notes essay. “Even so, as an aural record of an artist becoming himself — or in Dylan’s case, his first of many artistic selves — the collection aims to collapse time and space, not as a nostalgic reverie but as a living connection between the past and the present, the old and the new, which are never as distinct as we might think.”

To preview the set, Dylan’s label has released an outtake of “Rocks and Gravel” recorded in studio on April 25, 1962 to steaming services and YouTube.

Dylan began digging into his vault with 1991’s “The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3: Rare and Unreleased 1961–1991.” In the decades since, he has used the series to present unreleased key concerts as well as deep dives into various albums and eras.

By SCOTT BAUER

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Department of Justice on Monday asked a judge to immediately put on hold his order that would require elections officials to verify the citizenship of all 3.6 million registered Wisconsin voters before the next statewide election in February.

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The state justice department, which represents the Wisconsin Elections Commission, is seeking the stay of Friday’s ruling pending an appeal.

The fight over verifying the citizenship status of voters in battleground Wisconsin comes as President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has sought voter records from at least 19 states, including Wisconsin. Trump’s Justice Department is taking steps to crack down on voter fraud and noncitizen voting, both of which are rare but have been the subject of years of false claims from Trump and his allies.

The Wisconsin lawsuit was filed in August 2024 in the lead-up to the November presidential election by two suburban Milwaukee voters, including a longtime critic of how elections are run in the state.

They sought a court order requiring the Wisconsin Elections Commission and state Department of Transportation to verify the citizenship of all applicants registering to vote. They argued that the state elections commission is failing to investigate unlawful voter registrations and not taking steps to ensure that noncitizens are not voting.

The state justice department argued that there is no requirement or duty under Wisconsin law for the elections commission and transportation department to share and match data to remove non-citizens from the statewide voter list.

Wisconsin law requires voters to certify that they are U.S. citizens but does not require election officials to obtain proof or require voters to present any.

Waukesha County Circuit Judge Michael Maxwell ruled on Friday that the elections commission is “violating state and federal statutes by maintaining an election system that potentially allows individuals on to the voter rolls who may not be lawfully entitled to cast a vote in Wisconsin.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission “is failing in the most basic task of ensuring that only lawful voters make it to the voter roll from where lawful votes are cast,” the judge ruled.

He ordered the elections commission to review the voter rolls before the Feb. 18 spring primary election to determine if anyone who is not a U.S. citizen is registered to vote. He also prohibited accepting any new voter registration request “without verification that the applicant is a U.S. citizen.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat who is considering running for governor, argued Monday that the court’s order would “require a massive overhaul of Wisconsin’s voter registration system and the creation of new verification requirements not otherwise provided for by statute.”

Further, the judge’s order does not explain what it would entail to verify that an applicant is a U.S. citizen. Requiring additional documents, like a U.S. passport, will take time to implement, Kaul argued.

“A major modification to Wisconsin’s electronic voter registration process will require months of development and testing before the changes may be deployed,” he said in the request for a stay of the ruling.

Any disabling of the voter registration system while those changes are implemented would violate the rights of others who are trying to register, Kaul argued. The state receives an average of 200 online voter registrations each day, he said.

Kevin Scott, an attorney for the voters who brought the lawsuit, said in a statement Monday that he hoped the state elections commission “does the right thing” and works to implement the judge’s ruling.

A spokeswoman for the state elections commission did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

“It is far too difficult to get a street tree planted in the five boroughs. The Urban Forest Plan must reverse this paradigm; if the goal of growing the city’s tree canopy to 30 percent coverage is as worthy as we say it is, let’s pull out the stops.”

A newly planted tree in the Bronx. (NYC Council/William Alatriste)

As New York City develops its new Urban Forest Plan, I couldn’t be more excited. Given the urban heat island effect, cloudburst flood events, air pollution, and climate change, we need trees more than ever. As this past Saturday, Oct. 4, marked City of Forest Day, it’s worth asking: to be effective, what should this new Plan emphasize?

First and foremost: get more trees in the ground 

As I know from experience, it is far too difficult to get a street tree planted in the five boroughs. The Urban Forest Plan must reverse this paradigm; if the goal of growing the city’s tree canopy to 30 percent coverage is as worthy as we say it is, let’s pull out the stops. 

The city’s new Urban Forest Plan needs to reduce hurdles to getting new trees in the ground – and it needs to let everyday New Yorkers help in real ways to make that happen, even if it means city agencies accepting more informality and imperfection than usual. 

Flipping the constrained street tree script

Here’s how we change the way we think about planting street trees:

The city should not prioritize jackhammering new tree pits into sidewalks given the number of existing open tree pits; focus on the extant low hanging fruit first. 

The city should conduct a lightning survey of all existing open street tree beds for actual underground pipes or cables (a typical Digger’s Hotline review, not the inscrutable “conflicts with surrounding infrastructure” analysis used in the city’s now-defunct 311 request-a-street-tree option). 

The city should eliminate its tree planting permit requirements (financial and paperwork). 

The city should publish a map showing all of the eligible tree pits open for planting. 

The city should encourage anyone (individuals, families, community groups, local businesses) to plant a tree in any of the eligible tree pits so long as it is at least four feet tall and staked. Non-profit partners can continue—and expand—their free tree giveaways. 

And then the city government should stand back after a bit of promotion of this new paradigm, and let New Yorkers of all kinds plant the saplings of their own collective future. 

Will this approach be less than perfect? Yes. Should it be done alongside city contractor tree planting? Yes. Will some new trees die? Yes. But will it lead to an overall greater number of trees planted and growing by 2030 than the city will otherwise be able to muster, even in partnership with large non-profit partners, by that date if it keeps current strictures in place? When the soil clods settle, I know we’ll see the answer is a resounding yes.

Today, open tree pits sit empty for years despite requests by neighbors and owners. Some individuals have even resorted to making donations of over $1,500 to a city-preferred non-profit to get a tree planted, if they’re lucky. It’s emblematic of just how wrong the default is: the switch is flipped to a presumption of “do not plant” instead of “yes, plant.” If the Urban Forest Plan is going to ramp up tree planting in a profound way, it needs to revamp the city’s calcified, overly cautious presumptions.  

Will existing contractor requirements for tree size, watering, staking, and maintenance be sacrificed for trees planted by the community under the new paradigm? In some cases, yes, though some of those things may well be replaced by community and individual efforts. At any rate, those considerations should be secondary to actually getting new trees in the ground, many of which will persist even with minimal amounts of care. But critically, the cost to get a given tree in the ground will be so much less than the current $3,000 per tree that it is worth the experiment on a large scale. I’ve seen a grassroots planting “pilot” prove as much.

Prioritize biodiversity, adaptation, species realities

Along with this fundamental shift in approach to help reach our tree planting goal, the Urban Forest Plan must also change other presumptions. For one, the existing limited list of permitted street tree species must be jettisoned to allow greater biodiversity and prevent single-species Dutch Elm Disease-style catastrophe.

Species that traditionally hail from farther south, like water tupelo (nyssa aquatica), should be tried out as the city’s climate zone shifts (Green-Wood Cemetery has been experimenting with this species, and we have seen similar “unlikely” species like bald cypresses succeed as street trees). 

Additionally, while native tree species should be foregrounded, the Urban Forest Plan must not be too precious. If arrived species are most likely to succeed in disturbed areas, we should accept their erosion control, flood mitigation, carbon sequestration, shade, oxygen production, habitat benefits, and higher growth rates in some cases in service of the overall canopy coverage target.

The script should be flipped here, too: instead of limiting what types of trees can be planted to a dozen or so, only a handful of the most noxious should be outright discouraged. I’ve long wondered why so many species of fruit- and nut-bearing trees are not on the permitted street tree list when there are several species listed that make just as much of a mess on the sidewalks and vehicles (gingko, Kentucky coffee, and sweetgum, I’m looking at you). 

Looking at the big picture

Taken together, these proposed fundamental shifts from the existing street tree-planting paradigm in New York City give us a real chance of achieving —and exceeding—the stated Urban Forest Plan canopy cover goal. It also gives everyday New Yorkers a meaningful role in a truly exciting citywide effort while building a corps of grassroots stewards deeply entwined with their curbside charges. 

Brad Vogel is a resident of Gowanus, Brooklyn. He has volunteered with and helped lead groups planting trees in multiple boroughs over the past decade. Vogel has long found inspiration in the legacy of the late Hattie Carthan, the Tree Lady of Brooklyn. 

The post Opinion: Flip the Script With NYC’s New Urban Forest Plan appeared first on City Limits.