AUGUSTA -- With Election Day closing in, Maine Democrats said Tuesday they were receiving complaints from people who are finding brochures in their mailboxes tying Barack Obama to 1960s radical William Ayers and suggesting the Democratic presidential nominee is soft on criminals.

"We're getting calls from people all over the 2nd District who are outraged and disgusted," state Democratic spokeswoman Rebecca Pollard said. "It's not something a lot of people in Maine are used to."

The slick, full-color brochures are paid for and distributed by the Maine Republican Party, and distribution appears to be heavier in the rural 2nd Congressional District, Pollard said. The mailings appear in Maine as robo calls and mailings in other states hit on similar themes in hopes of bolstering support for GOP candidate John McCain.

The Democrats said they asked Sen. Susan Collins, co-chair of the McCain-Palin campaign in Maine, to put a stop to the brochures. Collins, who is seeking re-election to her Senate seat, has already called for a stop to automated calls in Maine linking Obama to Ayers.

One of the brochures distributed in Maine shows a picture of Obama next to a quote, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." The quote's only attribution is The New York Times, Sept. 11, 2001.

Below the quote is a grainy picture of Ayers, identified as "Terrorist. Radical. Friend of Obama." Ayers founded the Weather Underground, which claimed responsibility for nonfatal bombings to protest U.S. foreign policies during the Vietnam War era. He is now a college professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Obama's hometown.