A Baltimore circuit judge ruled yesterday that it would be illegal for the city election board to carry out an order by state election officials to remove more than 32,000 names from the voter rolls.
Judge Joseph H. H. Kaplan settled a lawsuit brought by the city board against the state election officials, saying that purging the names would violate a state law that became effective Jan. 1.
Under a state law no longer in effect, the names should have been removed from city voting rolls last year, before the statewide elections, as part of the so-called "five-year purge."
The voters should have been removed because they had not voted in the previous five years. City officials did not remove them, citing the heavy workload of the election year.
Judge Kaplan said yesterday that removing the names now would penalize those voters unfairly in the forthcoming mayoral election.
Those voters -- unlike 103,000 others who were purged across the state last year -- would not have enough time to re-register for the election once they received notices of their removal, he said.
"There is nothing in the law I can find that would allow punishment of the voters for the sins of the city board," the judge said.
Removing those names now, as the State Administrative Board of Elections ordered the city board to do March 29, would violate the state law established to mirror the National Voter Registration Act -- the so-called "motor-voter" law -- Judge Kaplan said.
The ruling was a setback for the state election board, which at the urging of Republican board member Daniel J. Earnshaw has been pressing for an investigation of the city board since GOP candidate Ellen R. Sauerbrey lost the governor's race in November by a mere 5,993 votes.
Mr. Earnshaw, a Harford County lawyer and one of two Republicans on the five-member state board, said he would ask the state board to authorize an appeal of Judge Kaplan's ruling.
Judge Kaplan also ordered the state board to approve a "voter verification mailing" to determine which city voters -- including the 32,000 in question -- no longer reside at the address on their registration records.
Such a mailing had been proposed by the city board, but the state panel did not approve the request.
Under the proposal -- which the attorney general's office would like to see approved by 11 a.m. today -- any voter who was found to be ineligible because of the verification mailing would be placed on an inactive list. Voters on the inactive list could vote on Election Day if they could prove at the polls that they still resided in the district where they were registered and signed an affidavit to that effect.
That mechanism is permitted under the new law and suggested by the Federal Election Commission as a way legally to limit the number of names on voting rolls.
Mr. Earnshaw said the mail verification proposal would go into effect "over my dead body."
In a related matter yesterday, Ralph S. Tyler III, the deputy attorney general representing the city election board, dismissed a televised report Monday that suggested the governor's race could be overturned based on the use of "lock boxes" attached to voting machines in Baltimore and Prince George's County that were used to hold keys to the machines. The boxes were first reported by The Sun in a Jan. 9 article about problems with security for voting machines keys in some city precincts during November's general election.
"The type of [voting] machines used in Baltimore City . . . are statutorily certified as appropriate voting systems," Mr. Tyler said. "There is no evidence that the presence of these boxes compromised the integrity of the machines."
