Driving through liberal pockets of coastal Maine this summer, one could not miss the yard signs. “No CMP Corridor,” they shouted out. “Vote Yes on 1,” they blared.
Maine’s first referendum question on the 2021 ballot has inundated political and environmental debates since 2019, and it holds the record for the most expensive ballot question in the state’s history, with the campaigns for and against it having spent a combined total of over $71 million.
The referendum asked voters whether they supported the termination of the New England Clean Energy Connect, a project started in 2018 by Central Maine Power in collaboration with Hydro-Quebec and various Massachusetts-based electric companies. The project, known colloquially as the CMP Corridor, would construct 145 miles of high-impact electricity transmission lines through Maine to connect energy from the Canadian hydropower company Hydro-Quebec to the New England energy grid.
As the United States moves towards net-zero carbon emissions, its power grid is not equipped to handle the demand of electrification as more sectors go renewable. Its expansion via new transmission lines will be essential to meet climate goals and connect renewable energy sources like wind and solar farms to the places where energy is needed, like big cities. Expanding and modernizing the electrical grid is a goal of the Biden administration, which offers financing tools for the construction of new lines.
The CMP Corridor would bring renewable energy into the New England energy grid, helping reduce fossil fuel reliance in the region and helping pave the way for electrification and decarbonization.
Mainers are consistently sympathetic to environmental goals, and yet nearly 60% of them voted to reject the CMP Corridor. Why did this happen?
The answer is corporate spending on ballot initiatives, an increasingly salient problem across the country.
Ballot initiatives, referendums, and propositions are used in 26 states. Ballot initiatives are citizen-sponsored proposals that, with enough signatures, make it onto the ballot and ask voters to vote on various issues, or sometimes on whether to repeal state laws. They are independent of the state legislature, and if they pass, they are enacted into law. They originated in western states in the early 20th century as tools of direct democracy and were used to curb corporate power over legislators during the railroad and timber booms.
Today, ironically, corporations have taken over the ballot initiative, dumping millions into initiatives that they deem relevant to them. In 2016 alone, corporations spent $140 million on just eight state ballot referendums, outmatching grassroots funding by an average of 10-to-1. In all 10 of the most expensive ballot initiatives in 2018, the side that spent the most won.
And so it happened in Maine. The corporate opposition to the CMP Corridor came from Florida-based company NextEra, which owns an oil-fired plant in Maine and a nuclear plant in New Hampshire, and two Texas-based companies, Vistra Energy Corp. and Calpine Corp., which both have natural gas interests in Maine. All three corporations have energy assets that would be undercut by the lower-priced hydropower from Quebec-Hydro.
These corporations spent millions funding Mainers for Local Power and No CMP Corridor, who exploited environmentally conscious Mainers by painting the project as an environmental desecration. They used conservation arguments to rail against the trees that would be cut down and ecosystems that would be disrupted by the construction of 53 new miles of transmission byways, and amplified the complaints of the people who live, fish, and hunt near the lines’ construction pathway. They so misrepresented the project that genuine environmental organizations jumped onto the “yes” campaign, including the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Council of Maine, despite the Maine Department of Environmental Protection finding that the environmental benefits of the project would outweigh its ecological impacts and ensuring strict environmental regulations as well as land conservation and culvert replacement requirements to offset local impacts.
Thus, despite the potential of the CMP Corridor to help electrify and decarbonize New England, corporate interests spending millions convinced voters that the project was actually bad for the environment, and the ballot measure to stop the project passed.
This is one case of many in which big business spending has influenced ballot initiative outcomes in favor of corporations.
In 2020, California’s Proposition 22, an anti-labor ballot initiative, also passed with nearly 60% of the vote. The proposition cemented rideshare drivers as independent contractors instead of employees, denying them benefits like minimum wage and organizing rights. It’s been called a “21st-century assault on workers’ rights” by labor advocates.
How did this anti-labor proposition pass in one of the most liberal states in the country? Again, corporate spending. Uber, Lyft, and other gig economy companies spent $205 million in support of the initiative, and led a successful misinformation campaign convincing Californians that the measure would benefit their workers on the grounds that their independent contractor status granted them schedule flexibility.
The issue of corporate influence on citizens’ path of direct democracy will strike close to home in Massachusetts on the 2022 ballot. Similar to California’s Proposition 22, the Massachusetts Coalition for Independent Work, whose members include Uber, Lyft, and other gig companies, has submitted signatures to get an initiative onto the 2022 ballot to define Massachusetts rideshare drivers as independent contractors, denying them the same rights as those in California.
The Massachusetts Coalition for Independent Work predicts a $100 million campaign and results similar to those in California.
Corporate interests and spending present a real risk to the avenue for direct democracy that ballot initiatives are supposed to provide. Inordinate corporate spending misleads the public, convincing voters to support or oppose ballot initiatives on misrepresented grounds.
How did this come to be?
Massachusetts is also the root of the legal background on corporate funding for ballot initiatives. In the 1978 Supreme Court case First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a Massachusetts law prohibiting corporate spending to influence ballot initiatives was struck down on First Amendment grounds.
Today, the Federal Election Commission does not regulate ballot initiatives in the same stringent way it does candidate elections. The FEC even lets foreign nationals spend on ballot initiatives, something strictly prohibited in regular candidate elections.
The lack of regulation on ballot initiatives is symptomatic of the disintegrating control on corporate spending in American elections. Should the FEC try to eliminate corporate influence on ballot initiatives by regulating their financing as it does campaigns, it would make little difference following Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on elections via super PACs.
With the current political atmosphere normalizing big spending on elections, it seems unlikely that regulatory change in ballot initiative spending will come any time soon. It would take a constitutional amendment or a change in Supreme Court interpretation to curb corporate dollars from influencing election outcomes.
What can be done within the current structure is to raise awareness of the problem of corporate spending in ballot initiatives and encourage voters to be more informed when they cast their ballots. As important issues like labor rights and climate policy are increasingly decided via ballot initiatives, doing your own research and looking into where the money is coming from is crucial. In the absence of structural change, we must do what we can to ensure that the ballot initiative process remains as fair and directly democratic as it was intended to be.
Image by Jaël Vallée is licensed under the Unsplash License.
