Maine Supreme Court affirms Bellows’ decision to invalidate trans sports ballot question

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court Friday affirmed the Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ decision to remove a question about transgender sports from the ballot this November because its campaign committee  did not collect enough valid signatures.

The group, called “Protect Girls Sports,” initially submitted enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot, proposing an initiative that would restrict what school sports teams, bathrooms and facilities trans students can access. Bellows later determined that the campaign had failed to qualify, after thousands of signatures were invalidated. 

That ruling was upheld by the Superior Court in June and the campaign appealed that decision to the Supreme Judicial Court, which upheld the lower court and secretary’s decision in a ruling on Friday.

“The petition fell below the constitutional threshold for an initiative petition to be submitted to the voters of Maine,” the court said in its unanimous decision.

At the heart of the Supreme Judicial Court hearing on July 1 was the role of out-of-state signature collectors, and whether Bellows has the legal authority to reject petition signatures gathered by those collectors if they did not check a box consenting to Maine’s jurisdiction at the time the petitions were submitted.

“We hold that the Secretary was not only authorized, but was constitutionally bound to impose and enforce the oath,” the ruling said, referencing the commitment out-of-state signature collectors in Maine have to make in order to be allowed to circulate petitions in the state.

The Maine Constitution prohibits out-of-state circulators from submitting petitions, but that ban was declared unenforceable by a federal appeals court in 2022, since it likely violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In response to a lawsuit, Maine then entered into a consent agreement, which all citizen-led initiatives still rely on to hire out-of-state circulators to collect signatures. However, they must consent to the state’s jurisdiction. 

More than 1,500 of the invalidated signatures were collected by four out-of-state circulators who had not checked a box consenting to jurisdiction. One circulator submitted a corrected affidavit months after the petition deadline, retroactively checking the box, which Attorney Tim Woodcock, who represented Protect Girls Sports, said in court should allow that circulator’s signatures to be validated.

The state’s highest court rejected that argument as well, saying “allowing ad hoc corrections with no specific deadline after the constitutional deadline for filing the initiative petition would not only effectively undermine the constitutional deadline but would also impose a burden on the Secretary that erodes her ability to fulfill her duties.”

“The deadline is reasonable and nondiscriminatory,” the ruling added.