Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows ruled Tuesday that a proposed ballot measure seeking to limit transgender students’ participation in school sports and their access to school bathrooms will not appear on the November ballot, after a staff review found the petition drive had submitted too few valid signatures to qualify.
The proposal, advanced by the parents’ group Protect Girls Sports in Maine, would have asked voters whether to require public schools to restrict bathroom and sports access based on the gender listed on a child’s birth certificate. The measure was one of several efforts in states across the country to regulate transgender participation in school athletics, a policy front that continues to generate ballot drives, legislative action, and federal litigation.
Bellows, a Democrat who is running for governor, said her staff determined that more than 12,000 signatures submitted with the petition were invalid. The disqualifications left the petition a few hundred signatures short of the 67,682 valid signatures required under Maine law for a citizen initiative to reach the ballot.
The Associated Press reported that the initiative’s backers had gathered enough raw signatures to appear viable during earlier stages of the process, but the verification review by the secretary of state’s office, a routine step for all ballot measures, brought the qualifying total below the statutory threshold.
The removal of the measure from the ballot does not close the broader policy debate over school sports and transgender students. The Trump Justice Department previously sued Minnesota over what it described as discrimination in allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls’ sports, and a separate Justice Department probe examined housing policies for transgender women in California and Maine. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling this term in a closely watched case addressing whether transgender athletes may participate on teams that align with their gender identity, a decision that could reshape the legal landscape for ballot initiatives and state laws.