The Maine Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments Wednesday about whether a referendum to ban transgender student athletes from girls’ sports qualified to appear on the statewide ballot this November.
In May, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows invalidated more than 12,000 petition signatures after a review found multiple issues including forged and duplicate signatures. The group behind the initiative, Protect Girls’ Sports in Maine, appealed their case to Maine’s highest court after losing at the Superior Court stage.
On Wednesday, attorney Timothy Woodcock with Protect Girls’ Sports in Maine zeroed in on roughly 1,500 signatures tossed out following that review. Woodcock argued that Bellows, a Democrat, exceeded her constitutional and legal authority when she invalidated the signatures from four paid petition circulators who did not reside in the state because they didn’t check a box agreeing to abide by the state’s rules.
“If this is upheld, it is essentially an initiative has been pulled off the ballot with 1,520 otherwise valid signatures on the strength of a federal court order,” Woodcock said. “That would be a remarkable result under these circumstances.”
Out-of-state signature gatherers have been a thorny political issue in Maine for years. In 2022, a federal appellate court ruled that requirement in Maine’s Constitution that petition circulators reside in the state was a violation of free speech.
But voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment a year later to remove the residency requirement. As a work-around, a federal judge in Maine signed off on an agreement between Bellows and a political committee that the residency requirement would only be enforced if a non-Mainer gathering signatures failed to explicitly agree to follow Maine’s procedures.
Woodcock told justices that Maine voters should have made that decision.
“What should have happened is the people of Maine should have reconsidered the absolute exclusion coming from the out-of-state circulator ban and come up with whatever conditions they wished to allow them in,” he said. “We don’t know because they haven’t been given that opportunity.”
But the justices seemed skeptical, at times, of Woodcock’s arguments that Bellows shouldn’t follow the consent agreement brokered by the federal court.
Attorneys for the state and several petitioners urged the court, meanwhile, to uphold decisions by Bellows and the Superior Court judge.
Christopher Brown, who represents three residents who challenged the signatures, said 116 other non-resident petition circulators checked off that box agreeing to follow Maine’s law. Only four didn’t comply, resulting in the 1,520 signatures being invalidated.
Brown also said Protect Girls’ Sports in Maine had “reached to the bottom of the barrel” in its legal arguments.
“And each of those arguments basically concedes that the initiative violated the letter of Maine law but asks for a get-out-jail-free card that the Superior Court rightfully denied,” he said.
Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Bolton, representing the secretary of state’s office, said Bellows swore an oath to uphold the constitution and also has an obligation to follow the process laid out by the federal court.
“What did not happen in this case, but should have happened in this case, is someone should have caught that there were those four circulators who did not consent to [the state’s] jurisdiction and the signatures should have been set aside,” Bolton said.
Under the law, the justices have until the end of next week to issue a decision on whether the referendum should go to voters this fall.
This story appears through a media partnership with Maine Public.