On Friday, November 13, the Howard County, Maryland, Circuit Court will hear Norman v Howard County, 13C-09-76855. The issue is whether petition signatures in Maryland are invalid if the signature doesn’t match exactly the name of the voter in voter registration records.

Back on December 19, 2008, the highest state court in Maryland, the State Court of Appeals, had seemed to rule in Doe v Montgomery County Board of Elections, no. 61, Sep. 2008, that petition signatures in Maryland are invalid if the name on the petition doesn’t exactly match the name of the voter in the voter registration records. This means, for example, that if a signer signs his first name “Wm.” instead of “William”, the signature is no good. It means that if the signer used a middle initial when he or she registered to vote, that middle initial must appear on the petition. However, there is some question as to whether the holding in that case is binding, or is merely dicta. The vote had been 4-3. The dissenters didn’t discuss the issue of whether signatures must be an exact match. The main holding in the Doe case was to invalidate a referendum in Montgomery County, and because the court also invalidated the petition on the grounds that it didn’t have enough signatures because the true requirement was 27,615 signatures, not 25,001 signatures, there was no need for the court to have decided the “exact match” issue.

The new case in Howard County is whether a Howard County referendum on zoning has enough valid signatures. The Howard County Board of Elections had already validated the referendum once, but once the Board became aware of the Doe decision, it rechecked the signatures and eliminated two-thirds of the signatures that had already been validated.

The 2009 legislative session considered SB 1067, by Senator Edward Kasemeyer, which would have amended the law on petitions to say, “If the Election Authority reasonably can confirm the identity of the individual (who signed the petition), the Election Authority may not invalidate a signature.” Unfortunately, the bill, introduced late in the session, failed to make any headway.

A federal lawsuit is also pending against any interpretation that Maryland petition signatures must be exact matches. It is Kendall v Howard County, JFM-09-cv-0660. On October 19, 2009, U.S. District Court Judge J. Frederick Motz ruled that because there is no federal constitutional right for voters to have the referendum process, it doesn’t matter how strictly Maryland eliminates signatures on referendum petitions. That decision is being appealed to the 4th circuit. Judge Motz, a Reagan appointee, had upheld Maryland’s filing fee for declared write-in candidates back in 1988, but the 4th circuit had overturned his decision in 1989.