Ruling Summarized

I got a chance to read through Judge Greenberg's ruling. Here's a kind of summary of what he decided. As usual, remember I don't know anything about this legal stuff. Whenever I've dealt with the law, the law won.

He agreed with some complaints about the signatures and not others. Most importantly, he didn't think the signature had to be exactly what is on the voter registration -- that was a big number of signatures, where middle initials were missing, nicknames were used, things like that. He let certifiers certify their own signatures. He did not let certifiers predate their petitions. He did not accept petitions on non-standard forms. He did not accept the Board of Elections' argument that they're not responsible to identify fraud; he said, "While the Board does not consist of a group of handwriting experts, its role is something more than that of bean-counter." Ouch. Following this logic, he threw out a number of signatures that were clearly not signed by the person whose name it was, though the Board had approved them. Finally, he disqualified a number of the "miscellaneous" signatures, where things were just screwy.

In the long run, the judge decided that the CRW had turned in 26,813 valid signatures.

Here's a big one. Judge Greenberg did agree with plaintiffs that inactive voters should have been included in the denominator to determine the required number of signatures. He concluded, "... it is inescapable that five percent of the registered voters in Montgomery County on November 21, 2007, was not 25,001; it was 27,615. Plainly, MCRG [CRW] did not gather enough signatures to meet the five percent threshold."

But -- that's not the end of the story. He continutes: "Plaintiffs, however, judicially challenged the denominator too late..." There is then some discussion of what the deadline should have been etcetera. Basically what it means is that none of the rest of it matters, because the papers weren't filed in time.

The summary line is near the end: "Plaintiffs are not entitled to a more deferential standard than the petition sponsors. Because their request for judicial review was filed on March 14, limitations bars any remedy."

Therefore, the referendum can proceed.

This is a fascinating twist of events. The judge agrees that they didn't have enough signatures, after he's eliminated some shady ones and added the inactive voters into the denominator (I am assuming the reader has been following this situation a little bit -- go back in the blog and read HERE, HERE, or HERE for background.). They didn't have enough signatures, but the complaint was filed too late, so none of it matters. And remember, nobody knows when the deadline actually comes, because the law doesn't define it. Even Judge Greenberg was not sure of the deadline to challenge the denominator.

Judge Greenberg seems to fully expect an appeal. I'm not going to predict, this will depend on factors that are out of my hands but I'd love to be a fly on certain walls this afternoon! My opinion is that it's better to spend a five-digit amount of money now to try to win an appeal than to give up and spend six digits or more fighting in the arena of public opinion. There will be some discussions, trust me, over the next few days. We'll keep you informed.