CMP, Versant and media groups sue Maine over foreign electioneering referendum

By Michael Shepherd, Bangor Daily News Staff

AUGUSTA — Maine’s two biggest utilities and two press groups sued the state on Tuesday, saying a referendum that would ban foreign electioneering here violates their First Amendment rights.

The three separate lawsuits were filed in U.S. District Court in Portland on Tuesday. One each came from Central Maine Power Co. and Versant Power. Another was jointly filed by the Maine Association of Broadcasters, which represents radio and TV stations, and the Maine Press Association, an advocacy group for newspapers including the Bangor Daily News.

The lawsuits come after 86 percent of voters backed Question 2 on the November ballot. It seeks to ban foreign governments and companies that are at least 5 percent owned by them from influencing candidate or referendum elections in Maine, also urging Congress to pass an anti-corruption amendment to the Constitution.

It came as an outgrowth of Maine’s 2021 vote against the hydropower corridor being constructed by CMP and Hydro-Quebec. Along with CMP’s parent, the provincial-owned utility spent a record-smashing sum against it, drawing the ire of corridor opponents whose race was funded by CMP’s competitors in the regional power market.

Under Question 2, both Hydro-Quebec and Versant Power, the latter of which is owned by a company whose sole shareholder is the Canadian city of Calgary, Alberta, would be silenced in campaigns. CMP’s Spanish parent is partially owned by Qatar and Norway. While CMP has said before that it would not be affected, its lawsuit seemed to acknowledge that it would be. 

Both CMP and Versant poured more than $39 million into a successful campaign to defeat Question 3 on last month’s ballot, which would have replaced them with a new utility overseen by an elected board. In their lawsuits, the utilities noted that they would not have been able to effectively fight the initiative if Question 2 was in effect.

“The [initiative] serves one undeniable purpose: to silence political speech by CMP, a 124-year-old Maine company that has been repeatedly targeted by proposed legislation and referenda hostile to its interests, including a ballot initiative that posed an existential threat to its continued operation,” CMP’s lawsuit claims.

Media outlets bristled at a requirement that they establish policies to prevent the distribution of communications for prohibited entities, saying in a letter to Gov. Janet Mills earlier this year that the idea amounted to “an oppressive, time-consuming, and costly self-censorship regime.”

Mills, a Democrat, vetoed the bill this year and opposed a similar 2021 measure over the constitutional concerns raised in the lawsuit. The press groups are looking to invalidate the portion of the referendum requiring them to enforce the law, saying it violates the First Amendment rights to speech and press freedoms.

“If news outlets are forced to investigate political advertisers and take down their ads, what other content and messaging will they be forced to investigate and remove next?” Sigmund Schutz, an attorney for the groups, said in a statement.

Proponents of the referendum slammed the utilities and the press groups for the lawsuits. Sen. Rick Bennett, R-Oxford, said all of them should be “ashamed of themselves.”

“It’s time for these organizations and their governing boards to heed the will of their customers and stakeholders, the people of Maine,” he said in a statement.