“The will of the people.”
We hear this phrase often in Maine politics, typically when the Legislature wrestles with ballot questions after their enactment. It’s a futile appeal to prevent lawmakers from “undermining” the outcome of a ballot question, even when obvious flaws exist within the statute, such as with ranked-choice voting.
Is “the will of the people” a fair characterization of the outcome of the ranked-choice referendum when the groups supporting it raised a combined $1.7 million in 2016, without a single penny raised to oppose it? Surely, there were Maine people who opposed the measure — more than 356,000 Mainers voted against it — but they weren’t backed by millions in out-of-state cash to prevent it from becoming law.
So whose will, and which people, are represented at Maine’s ballot box? The harsh truth: not real Mainers.
On Wednesday, The Maine Heritage Policy Center will release a report that analyzes the funding behind each ballot question considered by Maine voters between 2009 and 2017. The report also examines the checks and balances on Maine’s ballot question system relative to what other states with initiative and referendum processes employ. It will provide the most accurate estimates to date regarding the real amount of money contributed to our ballot question campaigns and where it all came from.
Groups such as the National Institute on Money in Politics and Maine Ethics Commission, which operate FollowTheMoney.org and MaineCampaignFianance.com, respectively, publish similar findings on their websites. But their estimates “double count” funds. Double-counted funds are committee-to-committee transfers of money between political action committees and ballot question committees officially registered to support or oppose an initiative.
These transfers should not be included in final fundraising estimates because the money being transferred was originally contributed by a different person or entity. In addition, such transfers can artificially enhance total fundraising estimates and the percentage of funds contributed from in-state sources. For perspective, we identified approximately $1.2 million in double-counted funds within the 2016 cycle, with the highest volume transfers among the Maine People’s Alliance, Mainers for Fair Wages and Citizens Who Support Maine’s Public Schools.
What we found is that, between 2009 and 2017, more than $81 million was contributed to groups supporting or opposing ballot questions. Approximately 71 percent of these funds came from donors outside of Maine, while only 23 percent came from sources within our borders.
Between 2009 and 2017, Maine voters saw an average of six ballot questions per year for which supporting and opposing groups raised a combined $9 million — $2.1 million from in-state sources and $6.4 million from away. All remaining funds were non-itemized, meaning they were contributions for which the Maine Ethics Commission does not require committees to report detailed information, including where it came from.
Committees that supported ballot questions during this period also significantly outraised opposing groups by accepting a far greater share of contributions from out-of-state sources.
This is noteworthy because ballot questions and people’s vetoes must be crafted so a “yes” vote signifies support for the measure, therefore petitioning organizations are always considered the “supporters” of an initiative. In other words, the groups that bring these issues to ballot are the ones filling their coffers with outside money to see them enacted.
In fact, more than 75 percent of the $81.3 million raised by all groups over this period went to groups supporting ballot questions. This 3-to-1 advantage in fundraising reflects a difference of more than $42 million, or nearly $5 million per cycle.
While opposing groups received a far greater share of contributions from in-state sources than did supporters (40 percent versus 18 percent), the majority of their funding (53 percent) still originated from outside Maine.
Alarmingly, the proportion of funds contributed from outside sources has also increased in recent years. In 2009 and 2010, out-of-state funding accounted for 61 percent and 40 percent of contributions, respectively. In the 2016 and 2017 ballot cycles, the proportion of funds from out-of-state entities surged to 80 percent and 87 percent, respectively.
These figures tell a much different story than the tired “will of the people” argument we hear up in Augusta.
Maine’s ballot question process was established to allow Maine people — and only Maine people — to circumvent the legislative process when lawmakers neglect to adequately represent voters, typically by failing or refusing to act on policies an overwhelming majority of their constituents support.
In recent years, however, Maine’s ballot question process has been utilized extensively by advocacy groups using outside money to achieve narrow victories at the ballot box. The process is regularly exploited by out-of-state interest groups that, often without formalized opposition, use Maine as a laboratory for ambitious policy proposals that could not withstand the deliberative scrutiny of the Legislature.
It’s time to put this “the will of the people” nonsense to rest.
Sure, it was the will of some people for these initiatives to appear on our ballot.
They just don’t live in Maine.
Jacob Posik is a policy analyst at The Maine Heritage Policy Center.
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