By Derek Viger

I stayed up until 12:30 Tuesday night hoping the results would flip.  They didn’t.  Question 1 passed and LD 1020, the same sex marriage law, was repealed. I woke up Wednesday morning feeling ill, overtired, and defeated. 47% of Maine felt the same way.  I donned a black shirt and went about my day.

Later that afternoon a disturbing trend started appearing onTwitter.  The previous day Maine and #VoteNoOn1 climbed into the top Twitter trending topics. Suddenly, everyone turned on us: Shame on Maine and Boycott Maine started to become popular topics on Twitter.  I have to wonder, what the hell are these people thinking?

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(Cross-posted @The Maine View)

Voters rejected a repeal of school consolidation in Maine yesterday. Question 3 failed 58% to 42%. Pundits almost universally predicted Question 3’s failure. Even those who called for victory for Yes on 3 weren’t particularly solid on those predictions. This was a hard one to game, so it’s understandable. What do the final numbers tell us about school consolidation and Governor Baldacci?  The answer might not be as obvious as you would think.

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Maine voters have, for the second year in a row, vetoed a bill enacted by the state’s legislature. Last year it was Governor Baldacci’s tax to fund the Dirigo Health program; this time, it was LD 1020, which legalized same-sex marriage.

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We already covered CNN’s fact-mangling in its article on the Maine marriage vote. POLITICO did slightly better today, but still misrepresents the nature of the election and gets some vital Maine political history wrong.

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A variety of ridiculous “controversies” have been alleged by various sides on several of the  referendum campaigns of late. This is a clear sign that we have entered the silly season on campaigns, and sadly this sort of nonsense happens every year, with every campaign. This year, though, some of the charges are especially ridiculous, and several are blatantly hypocritical. This sort of politics has no place in Maine.

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As we move towards election day, we will begin to see predictions about turnout. Of course, predicting voter turnout is even more of a guessing game than reading economic indicators, and Secretary of State Matt Dunlap has been even less competent at predictions than the state’s chief economist, Charles Colgan.

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CNN recently posted a report on the marriage referendum in Maine, but they ignored some, well, facts.

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There have been several reports recently about the funding of Maine People For Improved Education (MPIE), the PAC set up by Governor John Baldacci to fight efforts to repeal his school consolidation policy. Recent finance reports [PDF warning] reveal that, like last year’s people’s veto of the taxes to fund Dirigo Health, the pro-school consolidation campaign is largely  being bankrolled by large corporations.

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A mailer accompanied property tax bills recently sent to South Portland residents. The mailer took a political position on ballot questions, urging rejection of Question 2 (the excise tax cut) and Question 4 (TABOR II).  The Maine Ethics Commission is now set to investigate the city.

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We’re polling our readers on the various initiatives and people’s vetos on the ballot. We will continue with one survey each week, in the order the questions appear on the ballot, and with the same wording. So far we’ve polled on marriage, the excise tax cut, the school consolidation repeal, and TABOR.

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