The backers of a failed petition drive to put a controversial York County casino question on the November ballot have filed an appeal to the state’s highest court seeking to revive the campaign.

Attorney Bruce Merrill, who represents casino proponents, on Monday appealed a judge’s decision last week affirming a determination by Secretary of State Matt Dunlap that the Horseracing Jobs Fairness campaign failed to submit 62,123 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.

The appeal was filed in Business and Consumer Court in Portland, and the Maine Supreme Judicial Court must now rule on the matter – under a timeline spelled out under state law – within 30 days of Superior Court Justice Michaela Murphy’s decision April 7.

In the appeal, Merrill contends that Murphy made a legal mistake in her decision and that it “cannot be reconciled” with her ruling in another petition drive seeking to legalize marijuana. In the marijuana campaign, Murphy overruled Dunlap’s decision that its supporters, too, had failed to collect enough valid signatures.

In the casino campaign case, Murphy ruled that Horseracing Jobs Fairness failed to produce enough evidence to prove that election officials erred when invalidating 55,776 of the 91,294 signatures submitted for certification in February.

“Petitioners bear the burden of proof in the present action and cannot satisfy that burden by pointing to a number of alleged errors and asking the court to extrapolate from those errors that more must exist,” Murphy wrote in the nine-page decision.

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Most of the disputed petitions were invalidated because of questions about the signatures of notaries. Maine law requires a notary to sign each petition after taking an oath from the person who circulated the petition that all the signatures were made in his or her presence by registered voters.

Dunlap rejected many of the petitions on the grounds that the signatures of notaries on petitions varied from notary signatures that were on file in the Secretary of State’s Office. The majority of the petitions were notarized by Stavros Mendros, a former Lewiston legislator whose company was hired to collect signatures for the petition campaigns.

The casino backers contended in their first appeal to Murphy that instead of verifying each notary’s signature against a signature on file, Dunlap’s office examined a representative sample of the notary signatures. When an irregularity was found in the sample, all of the petitions signed by that notary were invalidated, a practice that is against the state’s own guidelines, the appeal alleged.

Mendros and his firm also were involved in gathering signatures for the marijuana campaign. In that case, 5,099 petition sheets containing 26,779 signatures were all notarized by Mendros but invalidated by Dunlap’s office.

The casino effort featured an aggressive signature-collection drive that raised questions in some quarters about whether Maine needs to tighten and reform its referendum law. The campaign generated complaints from the public about aggressive tactics and misleading statements by petition circulators.

Some of those circulators complained after the campaign that they hadn’t been paid.

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The ballot question would allow Las Vegas gambling impresario Shawn Scott – and only Scott – to build the casino.

Scott’s sister, Lisa Scott, financed the campaign, which at one point was paying petition circulators between $7 and $10 per signature during a furious push to qualify for the ballot.

More than 35,000 of the signatures gathered have been certified. By law, the certified signatures are valid for a year from the date the campaign began collecting signatures. That means the campaign could use its certified signatures in 2017 if it collects roughly 26,000 valid signatures still needed to qualify for the ballot on or before Dec. 7.

In the marijuana case, Dunlap has yet to decide whether to appeal Murphy’s ruling and has until the end of the day on Wednesday to decide, said Kristen Muszynski, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s Office.


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