[EL] State ballot-issue question...

[Adam Bonin]

Under Pennsylvania law, all information needs to be filled in by the
elector him- or herself with the exception of filling in address/date info
for residents of skilled nursing facilities.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15777217147527531729


Adam C. Bonin
The Law Office of Adam C. Bonin
30 South 15th Street
15th Floor
Philadelphia, PA 19102

(267) 242-5014 (c)
(215) 701-2321 (f)
adam at boninlaw.com
http://www.boninlaw.com

On Mon, Oct 3, 2016 at 6:21 PM, Tom Moore <tom at moores.org> wrote:

>
> Colleagues:
>
> In my spare time, I’m the plaintiff in a challenge to the validity of
> petition signatures on a charter amendment in Montgomery County, Maryland.
> We lost on summary judgment at the Circuit Court level last week and we’re
> filing a cert petition Oct. 4 to the Maryland Court of Appeals.
>
> The lower-court opinion is kind of wild, and I was hoping to get some
> reactions to it.
>
> The issue is that thousands of this petition's signature pages appear to
> have had significant alterations made *after* the voters signed their
> entries and the circulators signed their page affidavits, but before the
> pages were turned in to the Board of Elections.
>
> They’re a mess. Some entries have names that were corrected *four* times
> after the voter wrote something down, in four different sets of
> handwriting, in four different colored pens:
>
>
> (p. 2577) The only thing added by the Board of Elections was the red “OK"
> to the left. I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess which information the Board
> used to OK the entry.
>
> In *Whitley v. Board of Elections, *429 Md. 132 (2012), voter information
> was preprinted on a petition page using an online tool, and the page was
> then signed by the voters in that household.  The voters signing that page
> were held to have “provided” that information, as the law requires. The
> voter was not required to print or write out the information herself, as
> long as she signed the page.
>
> In this case, the trial judge read *Whitley* to say that voter
> information on the page can be provided *before or after* the voter’s
> signature is affixed, by *anyone*.  This can’t be right, can it?  It
> would seem to void every possible protection from fraud that the voter
> signature was meant to secure.
>
> The better argument would be that the voter’s signature puts a seal on the
> information on the voter's entry, and the circulator’s affidavit puts a
> seal on the five voter signatures on the page. Anything added after that
> has not been “provided” by the voter.  There is evidence that strongly
> indicates that the Board of Elections used the alterations to clear the
> entries (*e.g.,* what the voter provided was inadequate, the alteration
> conformed the entry to the law, and it was then accepted).
>
> The petition asks the Court of Appeals to decide whether (1) the lower
> court erred in allowing alterations to be made to petition entries by third
> parties long after the voter had signed the petition page, and (2) whether
> the lower court erred in applying the "substantial evidence" rule to the
> proceedings, which is an equally interesting, if more painfully geeky,
> question.
>
> Has anything like this come up anywhere else, as far as anyone knows? I’m
> having difficulty believing that any state has a rule that ballot-isssue
> petitions may be marked up willy-nilly after the voter has signed their
> entry.
>
> The cert petition and lower-court decision are combined in this document:
> http://no-on-b.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/moore-cert-
> petition-and-exhibits-to-court-of-appeals-100316.pdf
>
> If you’d like to take a look at all the petition pages, they’re here:
> http://no-on-b.com/petitions/
>
> Thanks!
>
> Tom Moore
> tom at moores.org
>
> p.s. FYI: The underlying ballot issue would apply term limits to the
> Montgomery County Executive and Council.  We found almost 5,000 alterations
> to about 4,000 entries; the petition-gatherers turned in ~17,500
> signatures, of which ~12,500 were approved, on a requirement of 10,000
> approved signatures. If these ~4,000 altered entries were rejected, the
> measure would fail to make the ballot.
>
>
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>
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