That's when the first obstacle surfaced. On Feb. 12, the elections board stopped counting in the aftermath of lawsuits filed by Oh and Richard Talkin, attorneys for Turf Valley project developer Greenberg Gibbons.
The suits - whose defendants include the state and county election boards, as well as Norman - contend that many of the signatures and printed names that accompany them were not rendered properly according to state rules. They also contend that 23 of the 26 people who collected signatures were paid, despite having checked a box on the petition saying they were not.
Oh said it is clear that most of the signatures were ultimately rejected - 86 percent according to Norman - because they did not adhere to guidelines set by the state election board.
The county board referred to a Maryland Court of Appeals ruling in December on a Montgomery County case that required stricter adherence to the state rules.
"What [the Montgomery County] case said was that you have to enforce the law, the law means what it says," said Oh.
According to state law, names have to be signed and printed the same way as they appear on the person's voter registration, or with the person's first name, middle name or initial, and last name to be valid.
At last week's meeting, state election officials said that previously, there only had to be "reasonable certainty" that the person is who they claim, and that information matches up with what is in the voting records.
State election officials said a meeting is expected to be scheduled this week with Howard officials in an effort to clarify the rules.
"The approval will be based on the [Montgomery County case] decision," Sandra Brantley, a state election board attorney, told the group gathered at the Wednesday meeting. "We don't historically make a recommendation to change the decisions of the court. We would take the decision of the court and incorporate it into the material unless you all decide to change the law."
Norman said his signature was rejected because he failed to put in his middle initial when he signed his name across from where he printed it.
Paul Kendall, a Washington attorney and Turf Valley resident who said he believes his signature was among those rejected, filed suit in federal court last week claiming that the decision by the state election board to reverse its original set of guidelines without any input from county residents was unconstitutional.
"It's basically a rule to ferret out fraud," Kendall said. "Nobody disputes that the [new] rule threw out a majority of legitimate signatures. The issue then becomes in a constitutional sense, 'Is the rule over-broad?' My argument is that it's not narrow enough to deal with the articulated harm, which is fraud."
Kendall said he believes that the ruling by the county election board has little chance of holding up in court under what will be judged as a "strict, scrutiny standard."
Meanwhile, the deadline for collecting signatures on the Turf Valley referendum has passed. Norman said that the issue regarding the rezoning in Turf Valley is a "separate fight" but that the issue regarding the proper signatures continues.
"While it might be our fight today, it will be somebody else's fight tomorrow," he said.
