AUGUSTA, Maine — A petition circulator and three Mainers filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing Secretary of State Shenna Bellows of misusing a 2023 court settlement to disqualify a ballot initiative that would bar transgender athletes from girls’ sports.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Maine, asks a judge to declare that Bellows lacked authority to invalidate the signatures and to rewrite the settlement retroactively to strip her of that power.
It came one day before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court heard oral arguments in a related state appeal over the same referendum. The case is the latest to grow out of Bellows’ decision to pull the referendum from the ballot, which came in the final weeks of a Democratic primary for governor that Bellows lost to former House Speaker Hannah Pingree.
The two cases ask different questions. The one before Maine’s high court asks whether Bellows correctly applied Maine election law when rejecting more than 1,500 signatures. The federal suit asks something a state court has no power to grant: an order rewriting the settlement itself. Because a federal judge signed the original settlement, only that federal court can change its terms or rule on what authority it was meant to give Bellows in the first place.
The plaintiffs are Cairo, a petition circulator who lives in Texas and goes by one name, along with Brunswick voters Jason McNeill and Matt Couture and Falmouth voter Sofia Pride. All had signatures thrown out or were otherwise affected by Bellows’ decision.
Bellows disqualified the referendum from the November ballot in May after finding it fell 532 signatures short of the 67,682 needed. Among the signatures she rejected were 1,520 gathered by four out-of-state circulators, including Cairo, who had not checked a box on an affidavit agreeing to submit to Maine’s jurisdiction.
Bellows relied on the settlement, which she helped negotiate to resolve a First Amendment lawsuit over Maine’s ban on out-of-state circulators, to justify tossing those signatures. Under that deal, non-resident circulators could gather signatures if they agreed to follow Maine’s rules and answer to state investigators. The new lawsuit argues the settlement never gave Bellows the power to void otherwise valid voter signatures over a paperwork lapse.
Cairo checked the required box on May 6 and testified by Zoom at a hearing six days later, according to the complaint. A state judge upheld Bellows’ decision in June, finding state law required the box be checked when petitions were filed.
The 1,520 signatures are a subset of the roughly 12,000 signatures Bellows invalidated in her broader May decision, which also cited forged and duplicate signatures and circulator misconduct.
The referendum’s backers, Protect Girls’ Sports in Maine, are pressing the state’s high court to overturn that ruling. Justices have until early next week to rule under the timeline set by state law.