The Post Has Some New Information

The Post had a good story on the current state of the battle over the petition signatures that the Citizens for a Responsible Whatever gathered and submitted recently. These signatures are supposed to get a referendum on the ballot in November to re-legalize discrimination against transgender people, and the Montgomery County Board of Elections validated the petitions but a subsequent search by a group of volunteers has found a huge number of invalid signatures, including alleged evidence of fraud. A group of county citizens has filed suit against the election board, saying they didn't check the petitions properly and that the referendum should not be held.

I mentioned the other day that there had been a court hearing and a date had been set, but I only heard that through the grapevine and didn't have all the details. A Post reporter got more of it:

Lawyers involved in a challenge to the referendum on overturning the county's new protections for transgender people were in court last week to talk about the scope and timing of the case. The issue has been assigned to Circuit Court Judge Robert A. Greenberg, and arguments are tentatively scheduled for mid-June.

Jonathan Shurberg, representing proponents of the protections, has challenged the Board of Elections' decision to let voters decide in November whether the law should stand. He has questioned the validity of signatures on petitions submitted to the board and the process the board used to certify them.

"We believe we have information that will end this thing if the judge agrees with our interpretation," said Shurberg, who represents Equality Maryland, a gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group. Lawyers Maneuver Against Transgender Referendum

They have to get the arguments in quickly, because this will or will not go into the November election, and they don't have much time to decide. The volunteers are working hard right now -- if you would like to help with the effort, please contact us through the email address up on the right -hand side of this screen, and we'll get your name to the people who are doing it.

There is some new and important information in this story.

Shurberg said Maryland's election law requires that a petition signature include all elements of an individual's name as it appears on the voter registration rolls. If a Montgomery voter registers using his or her middle initial, for instance, Shurberg said the petition signature must also include either the initial or the middle name. Shurberg and his team have reviewed thousands of signatures, and at last count, he said, nearly 4,200 signatures did not meet that standard.

Opponents, led by Citizens for Responsible Government, have said they followed the standards set by the board, which certified the more than 26,000 signatures, 1,800 more than the group needed to get on the ballot.

Kevin Karpinsky, the attorney representing the county's Board of Elections, was not available for comment earlier in the week.

OK, read those numbers. They had 1,800 more than they needed. Of the total, 4,200 have been found to be invalid. That means it's over. Of course, the judge needs to be convinced, I never try to guess what those guys are going to say. Still, if the law is as clear as this lawyer says it is, I don't see how they can let this referendum go on.

If Shurberg's argument fails, he said there is another batch of petitions that fall short of a separate requirement for independent verification from a so-called circulator. When opponents signed petitions printed off the Internet, he said, there was often only the signature of the signer and not the required second signature of the circulator.

The broad new protections for transgender individuals unanimously passed the County Council and were signed into law in November by County Executive Isiah Leggett (D). The law prohibits discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations on the basis of gender identity. Opponents contend that the law would allow a transgender male, for instance, to change in the women's locker room at a health club. Proponents say current law makes exceptions for such private areas.

Ha - that's a funny mistake in that last paragraph. A "transgender male" is a person who used to live as a female and is now male. It's not as complicated as it sounds, the person is a male, and that noun is modified by the adjective "transgender," to describe that they have had a history of sex change. A transgender male, as it says here, that is, someone who used to be a woman and is now a man, would not want to use the ladies room.

In fact, the CRW would assert that he should use the ladies room, since by some arcane scientific justification (absence of Y chromosome, for instance) the person is "really" a woman, pretending to be a man. I'll tell you, the ladies in the ladies room would not be amused if this guy came in.

Though "opponents contend" that the law would allow this, the truth of the matter is that right now anybody can legally change in any locker room, transgender or not. Exhibitionism, voyeurism, molestation are illegal, just going into a stall and changing is no crime. The new law doesn't say anything one way or the other about that situation.

The news here is that the lawyer for Equality Maryland is saying that even after the Board of Elections went through them, the CRW's petitions have 4,200 bad signatures on them. That means they have 2,400 fewer signatures than they needed to get. Those numbers had not been made public until now. Also, if that challenge doesn't work, Equality Maryland has another angle ready to go, petitions that were not legally signed by a certifier.

You might think of these as technicalities, but really the whole thing hinges on technicalities. The CRW was out there telling people this referendum would "protect the children," that it would keep predators and pedophiles out of the ladies room, and all kinds of crazy stuff, they were not candid about what the bill says -- the President of the County Council himself got in an argument with one of them, when they tried to tell him something that wasn't true. These signatures were gathered under false pretenses, but it's hard to challenge them on that basis, because it's a sad fact of life that people will sign something without paying attention. So the approach is to invalidate signatures because they fail to meet the legal standard.