LePage keeps pushing to make it harder for citizens to get referendums on ballot

Good morning from Augusta, where one bit of fallout from last week’s election could be a fresh push to make it harder to use Maine’s petition process to place referendum questions on the ballot.

Gov. Paul LePage said in his weekly radio address Monday that he would like to change the citizen-initiated referendum process so that signature gatherers would be forced to collect a proportional amount of signatures from each county. That’s according to WMTW because LePage’s staff didn’t send the weekly address to the Bangor Daily News and it isn’t posted on his website. Besides, the Bangor Daily News had this story thanks to our partnership with the Sun Journal on Nov. 4 after LePage visited the Lewiston-Auburn Rotary Club.

“Our state is large and diverse and we should have fair representation across our state,” said LePage in the weekly address. “Residents in southern Maine should not be able to control the citizen initiative process.”

The more populous southern portions of Maine are fertile grounds for gathering signatures compared with sparsely populated areas like Piscataquis and Somerset counties, where gathering thousands of signatures is far more difficult. The southern counties also tend to be less conservative, which offers some political insight into LePage’s call to reduce the value of registered voters’ signatures gathered there.

Read more: http://stateandcapitol.bangordailynews.com/2016/11/15/lepage-keeps-pushing-to-make-it-harder-for-citizens-to-get-referendums-on-ballot/