Equality Maryland: Petitions Certified in Error

Woops, I almost missed this one in this morning's Gazette.

Equality Maryland’s lawyers say the gay rights group will file a lawsuit against the Montgomery County Board of Elections this week, claiming the board erred in certifying 32,000 signatures from opponents of the county’s anti-discrimination law for transgendered people.

A preliminary examination of half of the signatures has turned up numerous problems in the way the group Citizens for Responsible Government collected the signatures, said Jonathan Shurberg, a Silver Spring attorney representing Equality Maryland, on Tuesday. He said he expected the lawsuit challenging the validity of the petition would be filed by Friday at the latest.

The county Board of Elections certified the signatures last week. CRG needed 25,001 valid signatures for the referendum.

The elections board followed state election law in certifying the signatures, board spokeswoman Marjorie Roher said Tuesday.

The law — which broadens the county’s existing laws to prohibit discrimination against transgendered people in housing, employment, cable television service and taxi service — was passed by the County Council in November. Board erred in certifying signatures, group says

OK, the game's on. Here's what we've got so far. The shower-nuts had to get 12,501 signatures by February 4th, so they could continue to collect signatures toward a goal of 25,000. They turned in 15,600. The Board of Elections went through and said 13,476 of those signatures were valid, meaning they had enough to allow them to collect the second half. That was about an 86 percent success rate, which is much higher than the usual petition, suggesting that perhaps they were not as thorough as they could have been. So Equality Maryland got copies of the first half of the petitions and started going through them, checking that the signatures matched the printed names, that names were actually registered voters, and signers were different from certifiers, looking at dates, and other things. If they find 976 bad signatures that were counted as valid by the Board out of the first half, that is 7 percent of the "valid" signatures, then the second half should not have been collected and the referendum is off.

Because CRG began the referendum petition, the law has been on hold, and would never take effect if voters strike down the bill in November.

‘‘We look forward to the next step, reaching out to the voters and informing them about this bill, which utterly fails to secure the safety and privacy rights of women and children,” said CRG president Ruth Jacobs in a release.

A CRG spokeswoman did not return a call for comment about the pending legal action.

Before the law was passed CRG had argued against a contentious amendment, which would have also included areas like bathrooms and locker rooms in the bill. The council removed the amendment and County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) approved the law. Still, CRG has argued that the law is too vague.

This is typical. They want something and then they whine complain when they get it.

About half of the 32,000 signatures have been reviewed so far, but there have been problems found, Shurberg claimed. He declined to say how many problems had been found, saying Equality Maryland had just received the second half of the petition signatures on Friday and had not yet had a chance to review them.

One of the questions is whether the signatures that were signed and witnessed by the same individual would be considered valid, Shurberg said. CRG had filed petition papers on its site for people to fill out and mail in.

Equality Maryland, based in Silver Spring, had received two matching grants totaling $5,000 to help pay for legal bills associated with the challenge. The group sent out e-mail messages to its members and distribution lists asking for contributions to match the grants.