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AMF “Promote the Vote” As a Maine business, AMF’s Promote the Vote Education program provides you with all of the necessary information and material to educate your employees about voting and the issues, right up until Election Day. Click here to sign up.
Communicating to Employees: Each subcategory under the Promote the Vote Program webpage has sample communications for you to share with your employees. It is important to communicate at least four times with your employees about the economic issues and the need to vote. Please also see our Economic Issue Papers for more indepth discussions on the major economic challenges facing Maine. It is also very important to communicate effectively and appropriately to your associates and employees. Please review our 'Dos and Don'ts', which is a simpe guide on how to approach these discussions. New State Guidelines regarding communicating to Employees within 21 days of the Election: A recent decision by the MaineEthics Commission could impact Promote the Vote activities in the workplace. Please follow our suggested guidelines to prevent any questions regarding your voter education activities. Specifically, the commission has decided that if a person – after October 13 - spends more than $100 per candidate on communications concerning a candidate, certain reporting requirements will be triggered. The purpose of the reporting requirement is to determine whether a publicly funded opponent of that candidate should receive more public money for their campaign as a consequence of those communications. As a result, the commission has advised people to send in the Rebuttable Presumption - Statement of Expenditure not Intended to Influence the Election form within 48 hours of the expenditure if it is made after October 13.
So, if you identify your local candidate in any of your Promote the Vote communications, or share with your employees where the candidates' stand on the economic issues or voting records (MERI or NFIB ratings), simply include a full slate of all the candidates statewide along with the specific information in the same communications.
Under these circumstances you should not be subject to the new reporting requirement because of the $100 dollar per candidate threshold will not be met. And, of course, if you spend less than $100 on the communication, there is no reporting requirement.
Although this is a potential inconvenience, it should be easy for you to avoid the greater inconvenience of reporting, and do so in a lawful manner.
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