House Democratic leaders are concerned about reported misrepresentations by Republican signature gatherers who are trying to repeal the state's tax restructuring bill.  So to counter what they say are signatures obtained under misleading pretenses, they want the Secretary of State to strike citizens' signatures from the petitions upon request.  This would require legislation that Republicans say is designed to distract voters.

The Democratic-driven tax reform bill that is designed to reduce the tax burden of most Mainers by $57 million dollars does a lot of things. But House Majority Whip Seth Berry says that taxing haircuts and social security checks aren't among them. Yet, the Bowdoinham Democrat maintains that that's just what Republican-backed signature gatherers are saying as they circulate petitions for a people's veto to overturn the tax reform bill that was passed by the Legislature earlier this year.

"The simple premise of this bill is that if folks are misled -- we tend to trust the folks that we talk to here in Maine -- and when they are misled they should be able to make a written request to the Secretary of State and withdraw their name from the petition."
 
Under current Maine law, the Secretary of State is not required to remove a signature from a petition at the request of a voter because it is presumed that the voter read the document before signing it.  Berry says the reality is that most people tend to listen to the circulator rather than read the document.  He and House Majority Leader John Piotti, of Unity, want to hold those circulators accountable by proposing a bill that would allow citizens to retract their signatures if they feel they have been misled.

"Only half of the story is being conveyed," Berry says.  "When people are collecting signatures, they are suggesting that the tax reform that the Legislature recently enacted actually raised people's taxes. The increases in the sales tax are more than offset by increases in the income tax.  The net result is $57 million in savings to Mainers, and to only tell half of that story is a pretty blatant misrepresentation of fact."

"This shows that Democrats have abandoned the working man.  I mean this is a tax on the poorest people, the working class, to fund a welfare state they don't want, they can't afford and we need to cut back on," says Charlie Webster, who chairs the Maine Republican Party.

Webster acknowledges that there have been some instances in which he's had to correct  information that's been circulated by some repeal supporters. But he says that the bill being proposed by the House majority leaders is nothing more than an attempt to distract voters from the GOP message -- and he points out that if the voter has second thoughts, they vote against repeal at the ballot box.

"We've got college kids who are going out and getting signatures.  And you know, these aren't professional politicians, and maybe they've said something that was inaccurate.  But frankly, the message is simple:  We're taxing labor charges on the poorest people in the state, the working class.  This is the party that says they're for the working class.  Maybe people will begin to realize that that's not the case."

And there are others who say majority Democrats are simply trying to create more obstacles for the people's veto and citizen initiative process. State Sen. Debra Plowman, of Hampden, is a Republican on the Legislature's Legal and Veterans Affairs Committee which would review the Democratic leaders' bill.

"Right now they're unstoppable.  Everything this administration and this Legislature wants will pass.  What it is is an absolute effort to thwart the will of the people," Plowman says.

All of these discussions are being monitored closely by Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, who worries about the implications for his office if Berry's bill does not contain adequate provisions to allow the petition validation process to advance in a timely manner.

"You have to have very careful parameters," Dunlap says. "Because the worst case scenario that could evolve into a nightmare would be either if you didn't have any type of time limit on this -- suppose I certify an initiative to go forward before either the Legislature or to the polls for a people's veto, and there's a massive drive to get people to withdraw their signatures and we get inundated with thousands of affadavits, then we have to go back through all those petitions and remove them and then recertify, that would be one nightmare."

Proponents of the people's veto have until September 11 to submit the 55,000 signatures needed to place the question on the ballot.