Maryland - Howard County court hearing on constitutionality of onerous petition signature validation requirements

by Steve Schulin, Maryland Independent Party, special to AIPNews.com

On Friday morning, at the circuit court in Ellicott City, a judge heard arguments about the constitutionality of a process where 87% of the petition signatures were not validated. Howard County Citizens for Open Government is the only group in the state which has actually had a batch of petition signature sheets evaluated by Board of Elections both before and after the state's highest court ruled that the Board was not properly implementing the state law.

In a weekend email, citizens' group leader Marc Norman reported that: "Yesterday’s court hearing was about ONE issue – what is the prevailing Maryland law for petition signature verification and is it constitutional?  If Judge McCrone decides that the December 2008 Doe decision clarified the prevailing law, we expect that he will then rule on our claim that the law is unconstitutional.  The 87% rejection rate (resulting from application of the Doe standard) presents a significant factor to be considered in that decision. Judge McCrone, who asked very insightful questions, has a unique opportunity (so early in his judicial career) to rule on such a significant issue that will most likely be appealed (through separate cases) to the highest state and federal courts.  This is the kind of case that you hear about during confirmation hearings."

Mr. Norman also characterized the Columbia Flier news story as a very well written account of the hearing (Ref: Jennifer Broadwater, "Turf Valley grocery store critics have day in court | Argue that elections board unfairly rejected names on petitions", Columbia Flier website, November 13, 2009).

Here's one of the issues highlighted in the news story: "McCrone [Circuit Court Judge Timothy McCrone] asked Richman [Howard county Board of Elections' attorney Gerald Richman]to explain how 'the average citizen' would know how each signer's name was precisely recorded in county records. Richman responded that the residents could have asked for a print-out of all registered voters in the county to verify the signatures, and could have requested that each signer to use the proper form of their name. In his closing statement, Carson [attorney Walter Carson, who represents the residents’ group] said it would be 'impractical' for any petitioner to carry around hundreds of thousands of signatures."

Mr. Norman noted in his email that "Judge McCrone, who asked very insightful questions, has a unique opportunity (so early in his judicial career) to rule on such a significant issue that will most likely be appealed (through separate cases) to the highest state and federal courts.  This is the kind of case that you hear about during confirmation hearings."

The email, which also includes correspondence between Mr. Norman and the Board showing that the signature standard is even stricter than used for voting, is available in the archives at the Yahoo group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/howard-citizen/

Previous AIP News story on why the signature validation criteria is an abrogation of the right to petition is available here.