Maine officials have blocked a marijuana legalization initiative from appearing on November ballots, citing one public notary’s allegedly inconsistent signature. The Wednesday decision infuriated the measure’s backers, who say they will fight the “handwriting technicality” in court.

In Maine notaries must administer an oath to people who collect signatures for ballot initiatives. The canvassers must be state residents and swear to the notary they witnessed every signature be made on petition forms.

More than 17,000 otherwise valid signatures were invalidated because of the one notary's signature being called into question, the Maine Secretary of State’s office said. If they had been counted, the campaign would have comfortably cleared the 61,123 signature threshold for ballot access.

A spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s office tells U.S. News officials never reached out to the notary in question.

“In this particular instance we did not directly follow up with the notary,” says spokeswoman Kristen Schulze Muszynski. “The staff felt like the signatures on the petition forms they decided to invalidate were obvious enough, they were markedly different from the bulk of the notary’s other signatures, as well as the signature on file.”

Neither the Secretary of State’s office nor the legalization campaign would identify the notary Thursday, but initiative campaign manager David Boyer says he knows the person and has seen the forms where inconsistency is alleged.

“I’ve looked at the notary signature and the one on file, and it looks close to me,” he says. “This is subjective, this is relative, and if we’re going to narrow a First Amendment right it needs to be spelled out. Leaving it up to someone’s opinion is not enough.”

Though his office now says it did not reach out to the notary, Secretary of State Matt Dunlap gave some listeners the opposite impression Wednesday, when he told Maine Public Radio “it became apparent to us that we could not get good answers to our questions about the relationship between the notary and the circulator.”

That comment gave campaigners the impression questions had been asked of the notary, something Boyer says he found to be untrue as the person told him they had not been contacted at all.

It’s unclear what state officials suspect happen with the one notary, who Boyer says had a signature on file from five years ago. Fraud has not been alleged.

In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, Dunlap appeared to imply officials felt the notary operated as a perfunctory rubber stamp.

“Some of the technical problems that were fairly serious, in our view, were around the circulators’ oaths,” he said. “It was clear just by looking at the documents that somebody had a stack of petitions and somebody was just notarizing them.”

The notary was the person notarizing them, Boyer says.

The campaign leader says he wasn’t contacted, either, about the notary issue before the Wednesday bombshell. But he says he was contacted about a circulator and provided the Secretary of State’s office pay stubs for the person, whose landlord he says also was contacted to confirm residency.

It’s unclear how the issue may play out in court.

Muszynski says notaries are “required to use their official signatures and despite what they may have for input, the invalidation stands.” Boyer says the campaign will argue residents are being improperly disenfranchised.

The Maine Superior Court must issue a decision 40 days from Wednesday, 10 of which are a window for the appeal to be filed.

Before the Maine surprise, pot legalization campaigners were bracing for a bicoastal, multistate sweep in November. Initiatives were also expected to appear on ballots in Arizona, California, Nevada and Massachusetts. It’s unclear if any of those state campaigns are in for a surprise.

The Maine legalization push initially featured two rival camps with their own preferred reform. The camps reconciled in October -- unlike rival efforts in Arizona and Massachusetts -- with the intention of greasing the wheels to victory.