By Becky DeKeuster
Despite robust support for legalization among Mainers, the path to legalized cannabis here took an unexpected turn last week.
In February, the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol (CRMLA) submitted nearly 100,000 petition signatures to put legalization on the 2016 ballot—far more than the required threshold of 61,123.
Maine is a small state, with a population of 1.3 million spread across over 35,000 square miles. That campaigners were able to collect signatures from nearly a tenth of the state’s residents was a victory, and a clear signal that the people of Maine are ready for a regulated, legal adult cannabis market.
But last week, the campaign learned that about 48,000 of their signatures had been invalidated by the Secretary of State’s office, for a variety of reasons. This brought the number of valid signatures below the qualifying threshold of 61,123.
The next twist in the road came with the news that 17,000 of the disqualified signatures were rejected due to an alleged discrepancy between the signature of one single notary who signed off on about 5,000 of the petitions, and the official signature card which that notary had on file with the Secretary of State’s office.
Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap told the media that his office had contacted the notary in question and said that “the answers were, obviously, unsatisfactory.” (Video at link; starts at 1:24.) That same day, his spokesperson told a different media outlet that they had not, in fact, contacted the notary or the campaign.
Campaign Manager David Boyer says neither he nor the notary were ever contacted. He says CRMLA is “confused as to why the Secretary of State broke office protocol and did not reach out about the notary in question.”
There is no requirement for the SOS to contact a campaign when discrepancies arise, but it is a professional courtesy. And apparently it is such a common step that Dunlap confidently asserted on camera that his office had done it, and had been dissatisfied with the answers.
CRMLA immediately announced plans to appeal the rejection of these signatures. If the appeal succeeds and these 17,000 citizens’ signatures are validated, the initiative will move on to the November ballot.
But the trail took another turn by week’s end, when the identity of the notary in question was revealed to be Stavros Mendros, a longtime political figure with a complex history in Maine.
A former city councilor, former state representative and onetime Congressional candidate, Mendros is president of Olympic Consulting, which provides campaigns with signature gathering support. Until recently, he also served as chairperson of the Androscoggin County Republican Committee.
In 2007, Mendros pled guilty to three misdemeanors after failing to be present to administer the oath to signature gatherers for a casino initiative, and was fined $2,000. In 2013, he was sanctioned by the state Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices due to improprieties related to a different casino campaign.
In addition to assisting the CRMLA signature gathering, Mendros’s organization also worked this year on yet another casino campaign—and that initiative also failed to qualify for the 2016 ballot, due to massive numbers of disqualified votes.
Some wonder whether, just perhaps, Mendros’s history with Maine initiatives may have influenced the decision of the Secretary of State’s staff not to reach out to the CRMLA campaign when they first identified what they thought were problems.
And others ask, why would the campaign use Olympic Consulting, given Mendros’s backstory?
One reason is that there are few options available for Maine groups who need help gathering signatures and wish to use an in-state coordinator. Olympic is one; state Representative Ben Chipman (D-Portland) also provides services to initiative campaigns.
Remember that there were two competing legalization initiatives here, up until their merger last fall—long after signature gathering had begun. While CRMLA had managed its gathering internally, the then-competing group, Legalize Maine, made use of both the in-state options to help them gather and notarize signatures. Because the merger of the two campaigns kept the language of Legalize Maine’s initiative, their petitions survived, and CRMLA’s did not.
For now, we wait to find out whether 17,000 Mainers will be disenfranchised; whether many more thousands of adult users of cannabis will have to wait even longer for legality; whether the economic boon of this newly-legal industry will remain out of reach in our state. All because of a judgement-call comparison between an “official” signature written five years ago, and the signature of the same person on the thousands of petitions he notarized during the course of the campaign.
CRMLA will file its appeal this week to the Maine Superior Court, which must rule within 40 days of Wednesday, March 2. The clock is ticking, and the road winds on.
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