Woman’s anti-casino signs barred

Until recently, Donna Chellis of Orrington had never been motivated enough to express publicly her opinion about a campaign issue by planting political signs on her front lawn.

But the contentious casino referendum question that voters will consider on Tuesday was different. Chellis and her husband were so passionately opposed to the idea of a gambling casino in Maine that she felt compelled to speak out for the first time.

So last Thursday evening, she painted a couple of small wooden signs with the words, “Casino No,” in black and red, and the next morning stood them up on the north side of her property, a short distance from the town road called Center Drive.

When she came home from work on Tuesday afternoon, however, the signs were gone.

“I figured someone had stolen them,” Chellis said. “I asked my husband about the signs when he got home, but he didn’t know where they were either.”

Chellis happens to live next door to the Orrington Town Office, so she stopped in to ask whether anyone there might have seen someone steal her signs. That’s when Town Manager Dexter Johnson cleared up the mystery.

“He told me he took them,” Chellis said. “I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine why the town would want to the take the signs off my property.”

State election laws, as Johnson explained to his neighbor, prohibit anyone from displaying political advertisements – including posters, stickers and buttons – on public property within 250 feet of a polling place or a town clerks’ office, for a period of 45 days before an election. When Johnson saw the signs next door, he got out his tape measure and found that all of Chellis’s property fell within that 250-foot buffer around the town office.

When Chellis argued that her signs were on her private property and were immune, Johnson informed her of something else she didn’t know since moving into the house three years ago. The town has a right of way that extends about 30 feet onto the Chellis property, which makes that part of the land subject to the 45-day sign restrictions on public property.

Johnson then took the signs out of a closet at the town office and gave them back to Chellis, who promptly placed them on legal ground outside the town’s right of way.

Curious, Chellis then wrote to the Maine Secretary of State’s Office for further explanation. That’s when she learned that on Election Day itself, the restrictions on political advertising would extend onto the rest of her property, too, since it all sits within 250 feet of the town office.

“Which means that on Tuesday, I can’t have any signs on my own property at all,” said Chellis, who is a teacher. “I also have a shirt that has “Casino No” written on it. The law says I’m allowed to wear that shirt when I go to cast my ballot. But if I wear it while raking leaves or just standing outside on my own lawn – on property that I work hard to pay the taxes on – I’d be committing a Class E misdemeanor crime and could be fined. Isn’t that a violation of my free speech? The same applies if I wear a campaign button that’s more than three inches [in diameter]. It’s all very confusing.”

Julie Flynn, the deputy secretary of state, explained in an interview Friday that the law, which has been around since at least 1985, is necessary to protect voters from being influenced or intimidated when they go their polling places.

“The law creates an influence-free zone on Election Day, and for 45 days before an election, when town clerks are conducting absentee balloting,” Flynn said. “It’s so voters don’t have to face a gauntlet of placards when they arrive. What we have to remember is that it’s a balance of competing interests – the right to free speech and the public’s right not to be influenced by political advertising.”

Chellis said she’s not angry with anyone – certainly not with her town manager, who was just following the rules, nor with Flynn, who promptly answered her questions about the law by e-mail. But Chellis said she simply cannot abide by a law that restricts her political expression on her own property, and she would like to see it overturned. She said she has been in touch with a Christian-based rights organization called the Rutherford Institution, which has agreed to represent the couple in a possible challenge of the state law.

“I really hate to make a big deal out of this,” Chellis said. “Even my husband laughs and says look what my little signs have done. But as law-abiding citizens, we feel we’ve been broadsided and a little bullied by this law, just because we happen to live next to a town office. It doesn’t seem right at all.”