AUGUSTA, Maine — Last fall, Stockton Springs resident Joseph Greenier ran as a write-in candidate for a state Senate seat on the platform that every vote should count.
But more than four months later, Greenier still isn’t sure how many votes he truly received in his unsuccessful bid for the State House. That’s because clerks in several towns never tallied or reported the ballots cast for write-in candidates.
“As a write-in candidate, I ran because they have to change for the positive,” Greenier said Friday in support of a bill to retool Maine’s write-in candidacy laws.
Write-in candidates for state or national offices already are required to declare their candidacy with the Secretary of State’s Office within three business days of an election. Lawmakers added the deadline several years ago in response to complaints from election officials who were spending gobs of time counting the number of votes Mickey Mouse, Abraham Lincoln or other fictional candidates received.
LD 547 would change the declaration deadline to 45 days before Election Day in order to give the Secretary of State’s Office time to provide local officials with a list of declared write-in candidates on sample ballots in advance of the election.
The bill also would require state election officials to include those write-in candidates on the tally sheets that towns use to report election results and require the Secretary of State’s Office to include write-in candidates on its election returns Web site.
The measure also seeks other changes, such as eliminating the requirement that voters include the write-in candidate’s town of residence.
Bill sponsor Sen. Peter Bowman, D-Kittery, said he initially agreed to introduce the bill for one of his constituents, Herbert Hoffman, who ran as a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate seat last November.
But Bowman said the more he learned about the challenges faced by write-in candidates, the more he saw the need for changes. Bowman said his bill aims to make sure that the election system is fair for everyone who runs for political office.
“It is important to create a level playing field for all candidates,” Bowman told members of the Legislature’s Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee.
Officially, Hoffman received just shy of 570 votes in his long-shot race against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins and her Democratic challenger, Rep. Tom Allen. But Hoffman said he knows he received more because he has heard from supporters in towns where the official tally still shows he received zero votes.
Deputy Secretary of State Julie Flynn in the Bureau of Corporations, Elections and Commissions said her office is supportive of most of the bill’s general goals, although she said some of the language would need adjustment.
For instance, extending the deadline for declaring candidacy to 45 days or even 30 days before an election would help her office, Flynn said. She also supported changes that would make it clearer that town clerks are expected to report write-in votes.
David Bright of Dixmont conducted a comprehensive review of write-in candidates during the November 2008 election. The results, Bright said, showed enormous disparities among how write-ins were treated. While some town clerks made a point of counting and reporting every write-in, others left them out entirely or merely reported the total number of write-ins but not the actual recipients of the votes.
“The bottom line is that in Maine, where we pride ourselves on the integrity of our voting system, votes cast by voters in 2008 were not counted, and others were not reported to the secretary of state,” Bright said.
Committee members also heard testimony on a bill by Rep. Michael Willette, D-Presque Isle, that aims to ensure that military personnel deployed overseas have enough time to receive and return absentee ballots.
The bill, LD 512, would require the Secretary of State’s Office to supply municipalities with a reasonable number of absentee ballots at least 60 days before an election. The current requirement is 30 days.
Flynn said her office supported the intent of the bill. Approximately 20 percent of the more than 700 military personnel serving overseas who requested absentee ballots did not return them in time in 2008, Flynn said.
The committee is expected to hold a work session on the two bills on April 1.