Whether or not the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights will appear on this year’s statewide ballot is now up to the court to decide.
Kathleen McGee, a political activist from Bowdoinham, is challenging the Secretary of State’s decision to accept a box of petitions submitted after the deadline from supporters of the referendum known as TABOR.
The challenge was filed Friday in Kennebec Superior Court, which has 15 days to review the case and 45 days to make a decision.
The box contained petitions with 4,024 signatures on them and was left behind when the referendum supporters delivered the other petitions to the secretary of state’s office on Oct. 21 of last year. The box was delivered on Oct. 24, three days after the statutory deadline, which gives petitioners one year to collect signatures after their petition language is approved.
Without that box the petitioners would not have had the needed 50,519 signatures to get the referendum on the statewide ballot. The secretary of state’s office validated the petitions on Feb. 21, with just 1,092 votes to spare over the minimum.
“They brought their petitions. They forgot a box. They brought it by 8:15 a.m. the next business day,” said Secretary of State Matt Dunlap last week when questions about the missing box were first raised. Most of the petitions were delivered on a Friday and the next business day was Monday.
“Everything was circulated prior to Oct. 21 and everything was notarized prior to Oct. 21,” said Dunlap. “I made what I believe was a reasonable decision…to support the public’s right to exercise their democratic rights.”
The referendum would support a law tying the amount of state taxes and fees the Legislature can spend to the rate of inflation and population growth, and require any overrides or tax increases to go out to the public for a vote. A similar spending limit would be imposed at the local level. (See related story.)
McGee, who opposes the referendum, called the Secretary of State’s decision “outrageous.”
“It’s beyond the discretion of the Secretary of State to decide the statutory deadline is not the statutory deadline,” said McGee. “5 o’clock on the day of the deadline is 5 o’clock on the day of the deadline,” she said, and to bend the rules for one petitioner isn’t fair to others, who have had to adhere to them.
McGee, who until last fall worked for the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund and was once part of the Maine’s People Alliance, said she has long worked on democracy issues. She was even allied with Mary Adams, the head of the TABOR petition drive, as part of a group opposing changes to the referendum process that would have made it more difficult for petitioners to gather signatures at the polls. It was an unlikely alliance of conservatives and liberals that included Michael Heath of the Christian Civic League, who sponsored the unsuccessful referendum last November to overturn the state’s new gay rights law.
Adams, who at first was miffed when Sen. Ethan Strimling, D-Cumberland, questioned the late petitions last week, said Monday she accepts the challenge now.
“This is not politics now. This is what is the law and we’ll all find out,” she said.
The crux of the challenge is whether statute passed in 1998 requiring signatures be turned in one year after the referendum petitions are taken out is in conflict with or simply further defines the rules regarding referendums found in the state’s constitution.
The constitution requires signatures be in by the end of January in order for a referendum to appear on that year’s ballot.
McGee believes her argument that the statute simply defines the parameters under the constitution is a “slam dunk.”
Adams said, “It’s clear the petitions are just fine and possibly the statute needs some tweaking in order to be clearer.”
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