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Do you favor amending the Constitution of Maine to change the time period for judicial review of the validity of written petitions from within 100 days from the date of filing to within 100 business days from the date of filing of a written petition in the office of the Secretary of State, with an exception for petitions filed within 30 calendar days before or after a general election?
Like many of the questions on the Nov. 7 ballot, Question 5 seems complex and bureaucratic, but it has a simple goal. The intent of this question is to give the secretary of state’s office more time to analyze and verify the signatures collected on petitions to get citizen’s initiatives and people’s vetoes on the ballot. It does not change the signature requirements or shorten the amount of time that petitioners have to collect them.
Instead, the change would give the secretary of state’s office more time to review tens of thousands of signatures, if they are submitted close to a general election. The process is labor intensive, with people reviewing individual signatures to make sure they are valid.
Last year, the secretary of state had just 30 days to review more than 159,000 signatures for two citizen’s initiatives that were submitted shortly before the November election. At the same time, the office was overseeing — and later tabulating the results from — a statewide election, including contests for the governor’s office, the Maine Legislature and Congress, one of which required time-consuming ranked-choice voting tabulations.
To complete all this work, many election division employees worked overtime, including around Thanksgiving, and some vacations were rescheduled. Employees were recruited from other divisions of the secretary of state’s office, including the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and a temporary agency was hired to help. The signature verification process was completed on time.
But Secretary of State Shenna Bellows then asked two other groups that had gathered signatures to postpone submitting them until after Christmas so her staff could take time off. The groups agreed.
It should be noted that if the signatures are not verified on time, the citizen’s initiative or people’s veto goes straight to the ballot. That would not change with this amendment.
“While we are immensely proud of the work we did and indeed are doing now, we know this is not a sustainable situation,” Deputy Secretary of State Julie Flynn testified to lawmakers earlier this year on a bill related to Question 5. “We are particularly concerned about the impact these simultaneous and arduous requirements could have on the quality of election administration in the future.”
“Additionally, in an era when we are seeing massive retirements and exits of election professionals from the field because of threats to election workers and the demands placed upon them, we are concerned that forcing staff to continuously engage in such intense overtime work without relief will contribute to staff turnover and difficulty in recruiting election staff in the future,” Flynn added.
Relieving some of this pressure at a time when the office is also handling election preparations and counts, without fundamentally changing the petition process, makes sense to us. Because the timeframe for petition verification, and any subsequent court challenges, is written into the Maine Constitution, an amendment is required.
Question 5 would change the language in the Maine Constitution to give the secretary of state’s office more time to verify signatures that are submitted within 30 days of a general election, which could avoid such stressful time crunches. We recommend a yes vote.