“It seems like that was the real legal strategy here: throw enough at them that it's just going to be tied up in court forever and the petition itself will ultimately expire. And we're not letting that happen.”
Informed Dissent · Social Issues · November 2026
Context
A Maine ballot campaigner describes how a legal challenge left his group's petition about 500 signatures short, with an appeal that won't be decided soon. His answer was to collect thousands of new signatures before the old ones expire.
Transcript
…been the founding force of the Protect Girls Sports in Maine ballot referendum, which would designate school, sports, competitive sports in schools, as well as private facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms and showers on the basis of one's sex. I'll give an update on that while we're here.
So let's first start with your petition drive. How is it going this year? Where are you at with signatures? How many did you need?
Great. Yeah, maybe I'll rewind very quickly and then I'll come back to where we are, where we are today. So in Maine, to do a citizens initiative like a ballot referendum, which we were doing, you need 10% of the last gubernatorial elections vote in signatures. So that was about $67,800 in change is what we needed. We collected those last year through the winter into early 2026. In February of this year, we submitted our petition with about 78,000 signatures. In March, that came back as valid from the Secretary of State. Some of the signatures fell off for lots of different reasons, but we were about 3,500 signatures over what we needed to be able to be on the ballot. 10 days later, the Maine women's lobby, you know, as represented by the Mark Elias Law Group, filed a legal challenge against the Secretary of State and essentially against us and our petition, trying to invalidate almost 60,000 of the signatures that we had submitted. Long story short, the courts threw out most of it. There…
How confident are you that you're going to make the ballot in 2027?
Look, I feel confident that when this makes the ballot, it is going to pass. I think we need to see what type of lawfare is enacted upon us once again by the Mark Elias Law Group, how Shenna Bellows and the Secretary of State or our new Secretary of State and potentially new legislature that's…
So I think listeners have been aware that recently we've seen more movement of high school girls in Washington. State walking off the field in a track meet. I want you to talk a little bit about what have you seen on the ground in Maine in the actual sports arena from the girls, from the high…