The Maine Constitution asks a lot of people who want to be governor. Among other conditions, a candidate must be at least 30 years old, a citizen of the United States for at least 15 years and “have been 5 years a resident of the state.”

I suspect that residency requirement, which is poorly worded, could soon be wielded against Dr. Nirav Shah, who is giving close consideration to running.

Shah himself doesn’t see any residency issue — I asked him about it. “Our home and residence for nearly six years has been in Brunswick,” he said. “We’ve owned and paid property taxes on that house the entire time.”

Six years ago, Shah moved to Maine from Illinois to take a job as director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a position that made him famous when the pandemic hit a year later. Shah left the position in 2023 to work as principal deputy director of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a post he held until early this year. While he held the federal job, he was often in Maine. Since the spring, he’s been firmly back in Maine.

Around the country, potential candidates have lost out because their residency periods fell short of what was required.

In 2022, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof quit his newspaper job to run for governor of Oregon. The state’s top court there agreed with challengers who argued that Kristof failed to meet the state’s three-year residency rule and tossed him off the ballot. It did not matter that he’d grown up in Oregon, owned property there, visited often and even expressed a desire to have his ashes spread on his family’s farm there after his death.

Kristof’s case focused on many of the same issues as a 1994 showdown here in Maine when a Republican opponent, Mark Finks of Falmouth, questioned whether Susan Collins, a little-known figure at the time, met the residency requirement after living in Massachusetts for 18 months.

Nobody doubted that Collins, who grew up in northern Maine and was running for governor, had extensive ties to the state, including a home in Standish that she occasionally used. The issue was whether state law mandated that she live only in Maine for five consecutive years preceding the election.

The Maine Supreme Court, in Finks v. Secretary of State, had no hesitation deciding that Collins could be a candidate.

The state’s attorney general at the time argued that Collins could be on the ballot as long as she had five years of cumulative experience in Maine at any time since her birth. Instead, the court pointed to another provision in the state constitution that mandated a governor be a citizen of Maine “at the time of the election.”

They said inclusion of the “at the time of the election” would be pointless if governors already had to be a resident for the five preceding years. Thus, they said, the five-year standard had to encompass something more than consecutive time.

Collins told reporters in 1994 that a successful challenge to her residency would mean that a Mainer would work out of state at their peril if doing so meant surrendering residency “the minute you cross the state line, no matter where you own a home.”

By next year’s election day, simple math shows Shah will have lived in Maine for more than five years in all, even if his time in Atlanta is discounted. Using the logic of both Collins and the Maine Supreme Court, Shah should face no residency issue. It’s a safe bet, though, that someone will argue otherwise.

Correction (Aug. 22, 2025): A previous version of this column misspelled the last name of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.