The art of referendum writing

For several years now I have been a well-paid consultant to Maine activists hoping to gain their particular political and economic goals through petitions and referendums. My professional firm, SynTactics, specializes in the writing of referendum questions so cunning in their wording that Maine voters end up doing an eenie-meenie before marking the ballot.

For readers not familiar with my work over the years I will offer here a brief overview. In 1998 for starters I was the proud author of a referendum question sponsored by a group in Lubec petitioning to legalize high-stakes penny-matching competitions. These contests had gone on in shameful secrecy behind the police station there for decades. Ultimately, conscience prevailed among the players and I was called in to make things right. The referendum wording I composed was arguably one of my best efforts ever: “Do you think it OK if nice folks, sharing the same dreams in life that you do, match pennies now and then so long as some of the proceeds are applied to research into a cure for something or other?”

Maine voters, many of them openly weeping in the voting booths, overwhelmingly supported the referendum. Across the state there were only three reported cases of option anxiety followed by court-ordered sedation.

Then, in 1990, a loosely organized group of tightly wound concerned citizens from the Greenville outskirts approached my home late at night, cautiously and in camouflage. Also armed. The contingent told me that they had gathered enough petition signatures to place on that year’s November ballot a referendum question aimed at making coyote-snaring the Official State Sport. What they said made a great deal of sense to me at the time. I agreed to compose the referendum question.

After I nearly lost the assignment on a technicality (I pronounced coyote in three syllables), one of my visitors hinted that it would be nice if I could come up with a wining wording right then and there. The challenge took me about three minutes and here is my question: “Would you think well of making coyote-snaring the official state sport if those who snare coyotes promised not to do so if you didn’t want them to, cross their hearts and hope to die?”

Chaos ensued. How was I to predict it? Not one ballot across the state outside Greenville was marked in the proper manner. Instead, inserted next to the referendum question, there were a lot of hastily and heavily scribbled expletives, many of them delivered in two-word imperative sentences, each aggressively punctuated by an exclamation point. The vote was declared invalid by the secretary of state.

Shortly thereafter, I had a bounty placed on me “if I ever stopped in at the Greenville IGA.” Ironically, despite that setback, I was later in the year awarded the coveted Composer’s Cup by my peers in WOW: Writers of Obfuscating Wordings. As I wrote in my self-published manual, “Fooling All of the Voters All of the Time: A Guide to Grammatical Guile” (Canon Copier 1993), “The goal when writing a referendum question is to blow smoke, to befuddle the voter into thinking that a no vote on the question will hurt someone or something deserving, or will reveal a mean-spirited mistrust of the motives of those favoring the question.” (Page 3)

I then provided an illustrative example of the craft cited: “Are you a decent enough person to care about the preservation of the endangered Katahdin hoptoad if fees paid by people-from-away who visit the hoptoad preserve are in part applied to the elimination of amphibian warts?”

But enough nostalgia. I am beginning to think that maybe it is time for me to retire from referendum-question writing and leave the field to those now far more skilled at obfuscation than I am. My turn in that direction has been influenced by Maine’s scheduled November referendum question regarding casino gambling in Maine and whether it should be allowed.

The question’s wording, approved by Secretary of State Dan Gwadosky, asks: “Do you want to allow a casino to be run by the Passamaquoddy Tribe and Penobscot Nation if part of the revenue is used for state education and municipal revenue sharing?”

Brilliant. I must admit it. Note the ambiguously spectacular smoke-filled phrase, “part of,” and the empty buzzword babbles, “state education” and “municipal revenue sharing.” We are in the presence of a real referendum-writing genius here. Bow down. As for me, I am closing my office tomorrow morning. I have more than met my match.

Charles Packard lives in Camden.