Referendum reform

This week’s packed public hearings on legislation to reform the citizen-initiated referendum process demonstrated that Maine people cherish their constitutional right to take lawmaking into their own hands. As admirable as that is, the hostile rhetoric and baseless anti-democracy accusations leveled against the reformers is unfortunate.

Compared with other states in which ballots have become clogged with dozens of citizen-initiated questions, Maine is fortunate that the process here still is used relatively sparingly. Still, after going the first 70 years of the 20th century with only one such measure on its ballot, Maine has experienced a marked increase; there have been 39 since 1970. As the techniques of signature gathering improve, the chances of enacting truly bad legislation increase. The two reform proposals – creating a petition-free buffer zone around polling places and ensuring that initiated referendums reflect a fair cross-section of the state – are reasonable proposals that do not deserve the scorn heaped upon them.

Those utterly opposed to any referendum reform point to a few high-profile issues, from the 1976 Bottle Bill to Medical Marijuana of just a few years ago, as examples of why the referendum process is needed, and they are correct – there are occasions when legislators lag behind public sentiment, when an issue is too ahead of its time or sensitive to be on a legislative voting record. Those occasions are rare, however, and too many citizen-initiated questions now are the result of interest groups simply wanting to take a shortcut through a process of lawmaking that works best when it moves slowly.

Maine has a large, cumbersome and fairly expensive Legislature for a reason. It is a citizen Legislature, filled with everyday Mainers, not professional politicians; it a large and unwieldy outfit that represents the public in a political system based upon representative, not direct, democracy. The legislative process takes forever – committee hearings, work sessions, House and Senate debates, conference committees. The result of all this time and expense is the Maine Legislature may pass laws that individuals may disagree with, but it rarely passes a truly bad, harmful law. The citizen-initiated referendum offers no such protection.

Nor does it currently offer any protection to those going to the polls on Election Day for the sole purpose of casting ballots. With the increased use of the citizen-initiated process, the exits, sidewalks and parking lots of polling places have in many towns become an obstacle course of petition-bearing activists. Polling places do not exist for this reason, and the pressure, in some cases the badgering, to which voters are subjected is unacceptable.

One of the reform measures under consideration, LD 1337, would move the petition gathering at least 250 feet from polling places, the same buffer zone that applies to political candidates. The point of this proposal is not, as some truly irate opponents alleged at the public hearing, to make the petitioners stand in the road or in a swamp or any other inhospitable environment on the polling place fringe. It to get them away from the polling places, period. The sanctity of the voting process must come before, way before, the convenience of signature gatherers.

The other reform proposal, LD 1518, would require half of the signatures to come from each of the state’s two congressional districts. As Maine undergoes a marked population shift, it is worth wondering how the more prosperous southern end can be kept from dominating the struggling north. This particular proposal raises equal-protection issues – the value of a citizen’s signature would vary with location – but it also highlights the vital issue of how all citizens, regardless of location, can have a voice in government. The large, cumbersome and expensive Legislature is one way. The citizen-initiated referendum, increasingly, is not.