On November 12, a lower state court judge in Wheeling, West Virginia, ruled that a city initiative to repeal the two-police-in-one-police-car law should not appear on the ballot. The circulators didn’t notarize the signatures. The local rule for initiatives is peculiar, because state law does not require candidate ballot access petitions to be notarized. See this story.

The circulators say they may do their petition all over again. They also point out that the City Clerk hadn’t told them about the notarization requirement and had even accepted the unnotarized petitions. The city had then sued the petitioners to get a definitive ruling. This is the same case in which the Fraternal Order of Police had intervened in the case, and had won an earlier ruling that the city should make the names and addresses of signers available to the Police. The case is Wheeling v Jones, Ohio County, 09-c-270.