Citizens filed petition for judicial review of decision of the Secretary of State that determined the wording of a ballot question for citizen-initiated legislation that would create a non-profit electric utility, challenging use of the term “quasi-governmental power company” to describe the proposed utility and requesting substitution with the term “consumer-owned transmission and distribution utility.”
The Superior Court vacated Secretary’s decision and remanded matter to Secretary to revise the wording of the ballot question. Secretary appealed.
The Supreme Judicial Court held that use of term “quasi-governmental” in describing the proposed utility resulted in the question being not understandable to a reasonable voter reading the question for the first time, and thus ballot question did not satisfy statutory standard.
Use of term “quasi-governmental” in describing proposed non-profit electric utility as a “quasi-governmental power company,” in ballot question for citizen-initiated legislation that would create a non-profit electric utility, resulted in the question being not understandable to a reasonable voter reading the question for the first time, and thus ballot question did not satisfy statutory standard, although some features of the new utility would be governmental in nature; term “quasi-governmental” did not appear in the proposed legislation and did not have a clear dictionary definition, the prefix “quasi-” had multiple meanings, and there was no existing statutory definition of the term.