Petition

Last week was a very good one for Maryland's governor. He helped President Barack Obama win another term, increased the number of Democrats representing his state in Congress while also getting all his party's incumbents re-elected and went 7-for-7 on ballot questions, including the history-making same-sex marriage law. So perhaps he was feeling his oats. At least that would explain why Gov. Martin O'Malley so rashly told reporters - practically before the unplugged voting machines had gone cold - that he'd like the General Assembly to consider making it more difficult for a Maryland law to be petitioned to referendum.

Those in Howard County who want to channel the power of the ballot box to challenge local government decisions are going to have to work a bit harder to do it in elections to come, thanks to the vote Tuesday on one of five county charter changes. Whether this was the change voters wanted to make when they endorsed the change in overwhelming numbers seems to be a matter of debate. By a margin of 73.2 percent to 26.8 percent, voters agreed to change the rules on how many signatures petitioners have to gather for a referendum to challenge local legislation, doing away with a 5,000-signature cap. Instead, petitioners will need a number of valid signatures equal to 5 percent of the vote in the previous gubernatorial election, which this year would have raised the number from 5,000 to 5,390.

In Maryland, residents are entitled to view the names of the people who sign petitions challenging state and local laws, but the matter of when they become public record depends on where you are. In the contentious drive for a Baltimore County referendum that would challenge zoning changes, developers and community activists who oppose the vote asked the local elections board for copies of the petitions that are going around the county. The opponents want to begin contacting people who signed the petitions because they allege that petition circulators misled citizens, and filed a Public Information Act request for the documents.

A Baltimore County judge allowed the release Wednesday of the names of people who signed petitions to challenge the county's zoning maps, saying the information is "clearly a public record. " In the latest turn in a battle between developers, Circuit Judge Kathleen Cox ruled that the county board of elections should make the documents public. Referendum opponents asked for the names because they want to lay the framework for a legal challenge to the petition filings. Several development firms are funding the referendum drive while others whose projects depend on the new zoning are fighting the effort.

Howard County residents have tried four times in the past nine years to challenge local government decisions on taxes and land use by referendum and failed each time to get the questions on the ballot. They've been rebuffed by opinions of the county's law department and by the courts, getting hung up on legal technicalities and the details of how signatures are validated. As difficult as it is to put a question on the local ballot, the bar would rise a bit higher if voters on Election Day approve one particular county charter revision, one of five changes proposed this year.

Gov. Martin O'Malley's brother has apparently split with the governor on two election issues, backing a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate and signing a petition to put the state's same-sex marriage law on the November ballot. Patrick O'Malley declined to talk with a Sun reporter who knocked on the door of his Northeast Baltimore home Monday evening. "You are not coming in. Have a good day," he said, shutting the door. A spokesman for the governor declined to comment for this article.

Maryland's rarely used referendum mechanism includes a twist few anticipated when they signed petitions over the past two years: All of those names and addresses are public information. The issue made its way into headlines in recent weeks when Gallaudet University in Washington suspended Angela McCaskill, its diversity officer, amid complaints from other faculty members that she signed the petition to put the same-sex marriage law on the Maryland ballot. McCaskill says she wasn't taking a stand on the issue of same-sex marriage when she signed the petition to let voters decide - and advocates on both sides of the marriage debate have called for her to be reinstated.

Stop! Don't sign it! A petition drive secretly sponsored by developers Howard Brown and David Cordish has been circulating for the last few weeks in an effort to quash all of the zoning changes in Council Districts 2 and 6 that were approved in August by the Baltimore County Council. This vote took place after an exhaustive one-year process of community input meetings, Planning Board recommendations and staff reviews called the Comprehensive Zoning Map Process (CZMP). Finally, it was signed into law by County Executive Kevin Kamenetz.

Gallaudet University is asking the group opposing Maryland's same-sex marriage law to take down a new commercial that features a university staff member who was suspended for signing a referendum petition. The new commercial, funded by the Maryland Marriage Alliance, shows footage of Angela McCaskill, the diversity officer who was removed from her post because she signed a petition to put the same-sex marriage law on the November ballot. "The video they are using, the ad, is actually copyrighted by us," said Katherine Murphy, executive director of communications and public relations at Gallaudet in Washington.

The Gallaudet University diversity officer who was suspended from her job after signing a petition to put Maryland's same-sex marriage law to referendum said she wants her post back and is owed compensation for the emotional toll caused by the firestorm. "This has been a tremendously horrific time for myself and my family," Angela McCaskill said at a news conference Tuesday outside the Maryland State House. "The university has allowed this issue to escalate out of control. They have attempted to intimidate me. They have tarnished my reputation.