Gov. Paul LePage was a vocal critic of the five citizen-initiated ballot questions this year and has argued in favor of making it harder for people to get referendum questions on the ballot. He is right about the system needing reform.
Last Thursday, LePage spoke at the Lewiston-Auburn Rotary Club and criticized the signature-gathering process that determines what referendum questions Maine residents vote on each election cycle. Instead of gathering signatures from 10 percent of voters in the last gubernatorial election, he said, people who want to put an issue on the ballot should have to collect signatures from 15 or 20 percent.
There are valid reasons to raise the threshold.
When lawmakers and voters approved a citizen petition and people’s veto process in 1908, they no doubt envisioned that the process would be rarely used — deployed only for issues people strongly felt the government had mishandled.
Today, most campaigns pay professional signature-gatherers, often with money collected from out-of-state interests. Maine previously tried to outlaw paying signature gatherers by the signature, but a judge found that law unconstitutional in 1999. One potential improvement, however, could be to require petition circulators to disclose their identities and whether they are collecting signatures on a paid or volunteer basis.
The proliferation of referendum questions shows that the process is not reserved only for critical issues or times of government malfeasance. In the first 80 years that citizen initiatives were allowed on the ballot, there were 30 such questions. In the last 23 years — 1992 through 2015 — there have been 37.
Maine voters on Tuesday faced five referendum questions. The approved four, which will legalize recreational marijuana use, increase school funding through a tax surcharge on high earners, increase the state’s minimum wage and implement ranked-choice voting. Voters rejected expanded firearm background checks.
It’s too easy for an interested party to send an initiative, which is written by the interested party to ensure its interests are met, to a statewide vote. Higher standards are needed.
In addition to requiring more signatures, another change could be to require that a similar proportion of collected signatures come from each congressional district. The Maine Legislature, however, failed last session to pass a bill to do just that. We would recommend consideration of a signature apportionment based on state Senate district (there are 35) to ensure an initiative only makes it to the ballot with a true demonstration of statewide support.
Without changes, referenda will continue to run the risk of presenting a simplistic view of complex problems.
Consider how citizen-initiated questions don’t have to clear the same financial hurdles as legislation. The Legislature’s Office of Fiscal and Program Review must analyze every bill, so lawmakers know how much the legislation will cost. If lawmakers don’t want to appropriate funds, they won’t enact the bill even if they support it. The state has to balance the budget.
Initiative questions, however, require no fiscal review, which means voters are often making decisions with significant financial implications without considering how to pay for them. For instance, voters in 2004 approved a measure to require the state to fund 55 percent of local education costs. The state would need hundreds of millions of dollars to meet the requirement.
But the ballot question didn’t say where the money should come from. Should the Legislature raise taxes? Should it cut spending and, if so, from where? The matter continued to plague Maine, to the point where education interests initiated yet another referendum question this year to pay for it by adding a 3 percent tax on individual Maine taxable income above $200,000 — which will return Maine to one of the highest top tax rates in the country. Voters approved the initiative but there is no guarantee that the money collected will go toward education as lawmakers may ignore the referendum results, just as they did with the 55 percent mandate.
Two referendum questions about complicated matters such as education, even if they’re well intentioned, do not make a carefully deliberated solution.
It’s time to raise the standards for sending citizen-initiative ballot questions to voters.
