Are you down to DJ a Maine election?
Regardless of your experience mixing tracks, you may have received a text this week seeing if you’re interested in disc jockeying outside a polling location in your county. The text, sent to some registered voters in all 16 Maine counties, offers a paying gig at an unusual venue — the polls on Election Day — and says playing will help boost voter turnout.
Several Maine DJs contacted by the Press Herald said they weren’t jumping to sign up, and that the text looked like spam.
“Is it real, or is it more AI crap?” asked Dave Dionne of Dionne Entertainment, a Lewiston-based wedding DJ company, who received the text. “It seems a little weird, and I haven’t heard of it before.”
The texts were signed by DJs at the Polls, and the offer is real. The nonpartisan organization hires local DJs to play at polling locations with the goal of increasing voter turnout. In the 2024 federal election, the organization placed DJs at nearly 6,000 polling locations in 11 states, according to its website.
In this year’s midterms, DJs at the Polls is expanding into 24 states, and — due to its high-profile senate and gubernatorial race — Maine is making the list for the first time.
“Maine got some contested races,” said DJs at the Polls founder Anton Moore, who lives in Philadelphia. “We need people to get out the vote.”
Moore started bringing DJs to a few polling locations in Philadelphia in 2012 as part of former President Barack Obama’s Get Out the Vote initiative. Working in radio and in local politics, he saw how music livened up areas where voting occurred.
“Music brings people together, music helps people have fun,” said Moore.
From there, the initiative expanded across the city, then to other cities and states, eventually becoming a nonprofit.
In a 2022 randomized control trial in Philadelphia, polling sites that had their DJs saw a voter turnout increase of 3%, according to the organization’s website. The organization tries to target polling locations in areas with a lot of low propensity voters, as well as in areas with more people of color, who historically have lower voter turnout, said Moore.
On Nov. 3 in Maine, the organization hopes to have DJs at 265 locations covering all 16 counties, said a spokesperson for the organization. The spokesperson said they are not sure how many Mainers received the recruiting text.
Even if the suspicious offer turned out to be real, the mass messaging soured some DJs to the proposal. Several wondered how the organization got their contact information.
“If it is legitimate then cool, but how did you get my number and why did you reach out to me in this nonpersonal way?” said Meredith Hillman, who plays under the alias DJ Foxy in Portland-area venues. “I almost hope it’s a scam and not them trying to blast people with all of this.”
DJ Maxine Darling lives in Springvale and plays in southern Maine and New Hampshire with under the name Cervix. She found the offer sketchy, she said.
“I haven’t heard of that organization. As far as I can tell, they don’t have any Maine roots. It’d be another thing if they were a local organization,” said Darling.
Moore said DJs at the Polls is planning to connect with Maine-based civic participation and music organizations in the months ahead, though that hasn’t happened yet.
Darling considers herself politically minded but found the concept of DJing for voters gimmicky, she said. Plus, Darling knows her tracks, primarily consisting of techno and goth music, don’t tend to appeal to the general public.
“In the ripe year of 2026, a DJ at the polls is not what’s going to get people to the polls,” she said.
Other DJs agreed that their work might not be the driver for Mainers, who have a variety of hot-button issues in mind, to go cast their ballot.
“I don’t think we need DJs or ICE at our polling locations,” said Dionne, referencing Republican candidate for Maine governor Bobby Charles’ recent comment asking the Trump administration to deploy federal immigration agents to Maine polls.
Jen Lancaster, deputy director of the League of Women Voters of Maine, said the nonpartisan civic engagement organization had not heard about DJs at the Polls coming to Maine. Still, they generally support nonpartisan citizen engagement initiatives, she said — in 2020, the nonprofit Pizza to the Polls passed out slices to voters — though the effect of these efforts can be limited in Maine.
“Voter participation in Maine is already so high, it’s not likely to make a huge impact. But it can make it a fun, family affair,” she said.
Engaging voters is year-round work, said Lancaster, with the League of Women Voters of Maine doing voter registration months before Election Day. Still, she said having some music at the polls couldn’t hurt.
“It’s a fun way to make people smile on Election Day,” she said.
DJs set up their booth in compliance with legal restrictions near polling locations, said Moore. If a DJ decides to sign up in Maine, participants get a stipend of $500, a generator and swag from the organization, said Moore. They can play any music as long as it doesn’t have obscenities, he said, and amateurs are welcome.
“If you’ve got a turntable, you’ve got a microphone, we’ll give you some electricity. You come out and experiment, come and play,” said Moore.
Based on his experience expanding the organization’s work into new states, Moore knows the text blast can be met with initial hesitation. He remains confident that interest from Maine DJs will increase before November.
“It starts off a little slow, then it picks up toward Election Day because people realize, ‘Oh, this is not a scam. This is really real,’” said Moore.
“They’re going to do their research, and you get an overwhelming amount of people that want to DJ on Election Day,” he said.