Secretary of State Shenna Bellows answers questions about disqualifying the transgender sports referendum on Tuesday May 26, 2026 on the outdoor balcony at Maine State House in Augusta. (Joe Phelan/Staff Photographer)

The question of whether a referendum about transgender student sports participation can appear on the November ballot is back in court after the secretary of state decided last month the petition was invalid because it lacked the required number of validated signatures.

The matter has returned to Cumberland County Superior Court, where three parties — the committee behind the referendum, the secretary of state, and a group of citizens who sued over the validity of signature gathering for the initiative — have all filed briefs in the past week.

The committee behind the referendum is arguing that the secretary lacked the authority to invalidate signatures, and that its question should be placed back on the ballot. The secretary wants the court to uphold her invalidation.

A group called Protect Girls Sports is behind the citizens initiative, which would bar transgender students from playing on sports teams or using private facilities, such as locker rooms, associated with their gender identity.

Gerald Butler collects signatures for the committee Protect Girls Sports’s citizens initiative in the lobby outside Hammond Lumber Auditorium on Nov. 4, 2025. (Joe Phelan/Staff photographer)<?xml version="1.0"?> Purchase this image

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows initially certified that the referendum’s organizers had gathered enough valid signatures, but faced a lawsuit in late March that alleged some were suspicious, and that circulators left papers unattended and did not witness all signatures gathered.

An official with the secretary of state’s office reviewed the case and found that the group fell roughly 500 valid signatures short of the 67,682 needed for the question to appear on the ballot, because some signature collectors failed to meet legal requirements.

In late May, Bellows, who is running in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, affirmed that assessment, and ruled that the question would not appear on the November ballot.

Now, the matter is back in court. The three parties met on May 29 to set a timeline: The petitioners (a group of three Maine residents who sued back in March) and the intervenors (the Protect Girls Sports organization) had a deadline of midnight last Wednesday to file briefs. The secretary of state’s office submitted its response Friday.

The petitioners — Jane Gilbert, Mark Sayre and Kaitlin Webber — argued in their brief that the whole signature collection process was “tainted by wrongdoing” because of signature collectors who left their sheets unattended, submitted false signatures or came from out of state and failed to fill out required forms submitting to Maine’s jurisdiction. They said Bellows reached the correct conclusion.

Protect Girls Sports didn’t directly dispute all of those claims, but said instead in its filing that Bellows lacks the constitutional authority to invalidate signatures and that she “exercised authority that the people of Maine not only never granted to her, but expressly denied to her.”

Attorney General Aaron Frey, who submitted the brief on behalf of the secretary of state, said she did not overstep her powers, and that the committee’s constitutional arguments are incomplete or fail to consider the government’s right to police the integrity of the ballot initiative process.

The secretary asked the court to affirm its latest determination: that the petition was 532 signatures short.

In replies filed Monday, the other two parties both affirmed their stances.

The court timeline does not specify when the judge will make a decision. A spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, however, said a decision would need to be made by Aug. 1 in order to lay out and print ballots for the November election.