Referendum

If you hate Maryland's new gun law and wish you could vote against it, Sue Payne is looking for you. The Montgomery County woman this week filed paperwork with the Board of Elections to petition the controversial new gun-control bill to referendum.  She said she bought a web domain, lined up a web designer to create a digital system for distributing petitions and is now looking for someone to take over the operation, which she calls Free State Petitions. “I will turn over the language to whoever wants to come and do this under the banner of Free State Petitions so that the citizens of the state can have a voice,” Payne said Friday.

If you hate Maryland's new gun law and wish you could vote against it, Sue Payne is looking for you. The Montgomery County woman this week filed paperwork with the Board of Elections to petition the controversial new gun-control bill to referendum.  She said she bought a web domain, lined up a web designer to create a digital system for distributing petitions and is now looking for someone to take over the operation, which she calls Free State Petitions. “I will turn over the language to whoever wants to come and do this under the banner of Free State Petitions so that the citizens of the state can have a voice,” Payne said Friday.

Regarding your report about Casa de Maryland and the ACLU's effort to block a referendum on in-state tuition for noncitizens ("Vote on tuition bill faces lawsuit," Aug. 2): I have been watching the letters to the editors expecting to see someone point out the irony in the efforts of these groups, who are contesting the petition signatures on narrow legal grounds. Yet they are the same people that insist anyone can come into a polling place and vote, even if they are not registered and present no identification.

Gov. Martin O'Malley plans to sign a law abolishing capital punishment in Maryland next week, though a referendum effort may be on the horizon. O'Malley's spokesman Raquel Guillory confirmed Thursday that the death penalty repeal law is scheduled to be signed on May 2. Maryland will become the sixth state in as many years to abandon state executions. Five men, all convicted of murders dating back to 1983, are on death row. O'Malley, who pushed for repeal, has said the men's fates will be considered on a case-by-case basis.  Maryland has had a de facto moratorium on executions since a 2006 court ruling overturned details in the process for carrying them out. The last execution in Maryland occurred by lethal injection in 2005.  After hours of impassioned debate in the General Assembly earlier this year, lawmakers voted 109-76 for repeal.

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.

In Dan Rodricks ' column on Christians' view of marriage he says "I can't imagine Jesus condemning gays, [who] should be able to marry under the law" ("Same-sex unions: What would Jesus do?" Oct. 25). But the law stipulates that marriage is between a man and a woman. With the referendum Question 6 on the ballot in November, its supporters are now trying to change the definition of the law. Marie Mullen, Joppa

I am very concerned that our elected Democratic leaders in Maryland are missing an extremely important concern this special session of the legislature. The efforts to ram another casino onto the November ballot threaten two extremely important referendum initiatives, namely, the gay marriage referendum, and the Dream Act referendum. This past Tuesday in North Carolina should be a warning to us all because by a 61-39 margin, voters adopted an anti-gay marriage amendment to that state's constitution.

Shame on CASA de Maryland, the group shamelessly advocating for illegal immigrants, and the ever-flaky ACLU. They are trying to sift through signatures on the petition against in-state tuition for illegal immigrants in order to throw out as many signatures as possible. Really? Obviously, CASA has no respect for the rule of law and the rights of law-abiding citizens. But the ACLU pretends to be about individual rights even if the individuals are not legal and breaking multiple laws.

Fresh off of his referendum victories, Gov. Martin O'Malley said that throughout Maryland's history the state has been better served by "a representative democracy rather than plebiscites. " I looked up the word plebiscite in the dictionary and found it means "a vote by which the people of an entire country or district express an opinion for or against a proposal especially on a choice of government or ruler. " Put simply, the people have the ability to voice their opinion on a choice made on their behalf by the government.

Petition signature collectors have hit the streets again in Baltimore County for a referendum effort on development issues - this time targeting a recent County Council bill that would protect a Middle River project from an earlier referendum challenge. Last month, County Councilwoman Cathy Bevins, a Middle River Democrat, sponsored and won approval for a bill that would let a Middle River development proceed, even if the zoning is overturned through a pending referendum attempt.

Opponents of Maryland's tough new gun-control law said Wednesday that they will not seek to petition it to referendum and instead will back a lawsuit planned by the National Rifle Association. "This is a constitutional right that should not go to the citizens to vote on," said Republican Del. Neil Parrott of Western Maryland, founder of the mdpetitions.com group that has successfully petitioned three other laws to referendum in the past two years. Flanked by representatives of the NRA, Maryland-based gun-rights groups, and other Republican lawmakers, Parrott announced the plans to a crowd of 70 at a Jessup fundraising event for mdpetitions.com.

Your recent editorial correctly pointed out that because Marylanders overwhelmingly support Gov. Martin O'Malley's gun legislation, voters almost certainly would approve it if it were petitioned to a referendum in 2014 ("Make our day," April 9). However, a successful referendum petition would delay the date when the law goes into effect by 15 months and thus postpone its life-saving impact by a similar period. We need to start as soon as possible implementing the law's fingerprinting and licensing requirements for handgun purchases, which is the state's most effective tool for reducing gun violence and saving lives.

I support the wish that the Sun's editorial staff has made ("Make our day," April 9) that Gov. Martin O'Malley's firearm legislation be sent to referendum, but for different reasons. First, it will give the law abiding citizens more time to buy the lawful guns. Second, it will give sufficient time for the supporters of the Second Amendment to educate the Maryland voting population that it is not the guns (or knives, poison, ropes, baseball bats, cars, etc.) that kill, it is the people (criminals, mental deranged people)

With Gov. Martin O'Malley's landmark gun control bill given final approval by the Senate on Friday and waiting only the governor's signature to be enacted into law, Democrats in Annapolis are likely hoping that the next step will be talk of the "R" word. And we don't mean Ruger, Remington, revolvers or repeating rifles. Would you believe referendum? Oh, gun control advocates won't necessarily be happy about the prospect of seeing the gun legislation taken to referendum - it would, after all, delay the effective date for at least 18 months while the matter is decided by voters in November 2014 - but you can bet a lot of people on the Democratic side of the aisle would be ecstatic.

The conservative group Judicial Watch has asked the Court of Special Appeals to overturn last November's referendum on a new congressional redistricting map for Maryland, contending the wording of the ballot question was misleading. Backed by Del. Neil Parrott's MDPetitions.com, Judicial Watch filed an appeal of a Circuit Court decision last year upholding the wording. The plaintiffs asked the appeals court to require a new election using different ballot language. The General Assembly approved the new map drawn up by Gov. Martin O'Malley and Democratic legislative leaders in a special session in 2011.

Maryland's Constitution provides recourse, the referendum, to those who believe bad laws are on the books or new laws are necessary. The general idea is, let's put it to a vote. The process for getting a referendum question on the statewide ballot begins with gathering a certain number of signatures on a petition. Enough signatures, and the ballot question becomes one of your choices on Election Day. But what about those signatures? Who gets to sign? How are the signatures to be gathered?

The citizens of the "Free State" have clearly demonstrated their constitutional right to petition to referendum legislation enacted by the General Assembly that they feel is contrary to the will of the majority ("Political map is headed for vote," July 12). Now that three controversial issues will be determined by the voters, you can rest assured that the governor, the legislative leadership and their Democratic puppets in both houses who feel they know what is best for voters will be conspiring to change the number of signatures required to petition laws to referendum and how they are submitted.

Governor Martin O'Malley's announcement that he intends to lead efforts to pass a same-sex marriage bill is about the worst decision this liberal Democrat has made yet to pull Maryland into the gutter ("O'Malley to back same-sex marriage," July 23). Same-sex marriage has no business in the Free State or anywhere else in the country. A marriage is between a man and a woman - period. This is all about the votes that the Democrats hope to win in the next election. If Governor O'Malley goes through with this foolishness, let the citizens of Maryland force it to another referendum like the one on the Dream Act's granting of college tuition breaks for illegal immigrants.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed that there are two kinds of market forecasters, those who don't know and those who don't know they don't know. That is well illustrated by the current disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street, as the market's leading indicator, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, continues to surge forward while the overall outlook for the U.S. economy appears mixed at best. The Dow closed Tuesday at an all-time peak of 14,253.77, and many believe that the bullish trend will continue even if there is some profit-taking in the short term.

As an elected official, I've introduced legislation this session titled the Referendum Integrity Act, which seeks to address shortfalls in Maryland's referendum system while also making the process of gathering signatures in Maryland more transparent and fair. Sun columnist Marta Mossburg and others have attacked the legislation as somehow disenfranchising voters ("Hypocrisy on voter access," Feb. 27). But a simple reading of the bill would reveal that it does nothing of the sort.