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Question 7 on Maine’s Nov. 3 ballot is a constitutional amendment designed to give clerical workers extra time to count signatures on citizen referendums and people’s vetoes.
Five of the seven questions on this year’s ballot are people’s vetoes or citizen initiatives, which each require at least 55,087 signatures to be approved as a ballot question. Municipal offices throughout the state employee staff to verify each signature on petitions is from a registered voter. Because petitions are often submitted shortly before they are due, clerical staffers at municipal offices often don’t get much time to count signatures before they are required to return them to the circulators. Question 7 would increase that time to 10 days. Municipal office staffers currently get five days.
“We’ve got so many citizen initiatives [and] petitions circling right now with very close deadlines, that when they turn all the signatures in … we get swamped,” said Linda C. Cohen, the municipal clerk of Portland.
Question 7 is Cohen’s brainchild. She thought up the idea of increasing the time for verifying petition signatures and spoke to Rep. Meredith Burgess about drafting legislation to fit the idea. The bill itself, sponsored by Burgess, was referred to the State and Local Government Committee March 25.
The official question on the ballot reads: “Do you favor amending the Constitution of Maine to increase the amount of time that local officials have to certify the signatures on direct initiative petitions?”
The question, if approved, would also give legislators 10 extra days after legislative sessions begin to submit legislation crafted from people’s vetoes and citizen initiatives given to them by political campaigns or voters.
“It’s the citizen initiatives and people’s vetoes. Usually those are on such a shorter time frame, you’ve got about a three-month period for people to gather signatures. … It deals directly with that,” said Diane Johanson, a legislative aide for the house republican office.
Cohen said municipal office staffers often have to work overtime to verify signatures and meet the deadline. She said her office used to have 11 people on staff, but now has nine.
“Eight of those positions are part-time,” Cohen said.
Petition signatures are sometimes hard to read, Cohen said. Municipal office staffers often have to compare the address given with the name with ones on registration cards to make sure it’s from a registered voter.
“So it’s a lot of work,” Cohen said.
Municipal offices are required to check every signature or at least make an attempt, Cohen said.
“Sometimes petitioners will drop them off on the absolute last day that they have to turn them in, and we have five days,” Cohen said.
Cohen said staffers have to verify signatures in addition to their other duties, including filing birth and death certificates and marriage licenses.
“If a funeral director comes in and has to bury a body, we can’t just say, ‘No, we have to do petitions,’” Cohen said.
Dan Shagouri, a legislative aide for Sen. Deborah L. Simpson, D-Androscoggin, said saving money is one of the reasons for the legislation, because the bill will likely cut down on the overtime municipal office staffers have to work to verify signatures. Simpson is chairperson of the State and Local Government Committee and approved the bill before it went to the legislature.
