(The Center Square) — Maine’s Democratic Secretary of State has yanked a proposal to restrict transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports from the November ballot, saying backers of the referendum failed to submit enough “valid” signatures.
Secretary of State Shenna Bellows announced Tuesday that her office reviewed 8,067 petitions submitted by supporters of the ballot question “An Act to Designate School Sports Participation and Facilities by Sex” and found 67,150 signatures valid and 12,542 invalid. That’s 532 short of the number of signatures needed to qualify for the Nov. 3 ballot, Bellows said.
“Citizen initiatives are direct democracy. Just as we take voting security seriously, we take petition integrity seriously,” Bellows said in a statement. “Unfortunately, some out-of-state circulators failed to meet certain legal requirements for petitions, resulting in this initiative failing to qualify for the ballot after legal review.”
Bellows said her office’s review found some signatures were “faulty” or “invalid” because petition circulators failed to properly witness voters signing the forms. Others were rejected after investigators determined they had been signed by someone other than the voter, she said.
The proposal, if approved by voters, would require Maine public schools to designate interscholastic or competitive teams for males or females or as co-ed. Only athletes who were born female would be allowed to compete on girls’ teams. Public schools would also be required to maintain separate bathrooms, locker rooms and showers for boys and girls.
The Protect Girls Sports in Maine, the ballot committee behind the referendum, collected more than 71,000 signatures from registered voters over several months and cleared several other hurdles to the November ballot despite fierce opposition from the Maine Democrats, who control the governor’s office and state Legislature.
The state Republican Party criticized the move, saying the signatures were certified by local election clerks and claiming that Bellows conducted the review only after “outside groups” questioned the campaign’s petitions.
“The way for Maine to have confidence in their governance, the rule of law, and security of their votes and signatures is to elect a Republican majority to Augusta,” Jim Deyermond, Maine GOP chairman, said in a statement. “Shenna Bellows has a bad habit of abusing her power as Secretary of State for her own political agenda, and she needs to be stopped.”
Bellows, a former state senator who is running for governor, was previously criticized by groups backing the proposal who claimed she was trying to “mislead” voters with her office’s wording of the ballot question. Bellows denied the claims, calling them politically motivated.
But Maine has also been a focus of the national debate over transgender athletes in female sports after a confrontation between Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and Republican President Donald Trump, who has vowed to withhold federal funding from any states that fail to comply with his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order.
Bellows said the decision can be appealed within 10 days. The Secretary of State’s Office said it will announce on Thursday the final wording of the referendum if it is restored to the ballot.
