Maine’s top election official has disqualified Donald Trump from the state ballot in next year’s US presidential primary election,.

The decision on Thursday (US time) makes Maine the second US state to bar the former president for his role in the attack on the Capitol.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, concluded that Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024, incited an insurrection when he spread false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and then urged his supporters to march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to stop lawmakers from certifying the vote.

Bellows suspended her decision until the state supreme court ruled on the matter.

Trump’s campaign promptly lashed the decision as “attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.”

“Make no mistake, these partisan election interference efforts are a hostile assault on American democracy,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement.

He also accused President Joe Biden and Democrats of “relying on the force of government institutions to protect their grip on power” – and flagged an appeal.

Thursday’s ruling came after a group of former Maine lawmakers said that Trump should be disqualified based on a provision of the US Constitution that bars people from holding office if they engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” after previously swearing an oath to the US.

The ruling, which can be appealed to a state court, applies only to the March primary election. But it could affect Trump’s status for the November general election.

It likely will add to pressure on the US Supreme Court to resolve questions about Trump’s eligibility nationwide under the constitutional provision known as section three of the 14th Amendment.

Trump has been indicted in both a federal case and in Georgia for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election but he has not been charged with insurrection related to the January 6 attack. He leads opinion polls by a large margin in the race for the Republican nomination in 2024.

Colorado’s top court disqualified Trump from its state primary ballot on December 19, making him the first candidate in history to be deemed ineligible for the presidency for engaging in insurrection.

Trump has vowed to appeal the Colorado ruling to the Supreme Court and criticised ballot challenges as “undemocratic”. The Colorado Republican Party filed its own Supreme Court appeal on Wednesday.

Similar attempts to disqualify Trump in other states have been rejected. The top court in Michigan, a pivotal battleground state in the general election, declined on Wednesday to hear an appeal on Trump’s eligibility to hold office.

-with AAP