Maryland Court Rulings Cause Serious Problems

I don't like the impact of the Friday's state court rulings. I favor early voting and think Perez should be on the ballot. However, the court has yet to release its opinions yet so I cannot judge their interpretation of our state constitution which is a rather long and ponderous document. My favorite article involves off-street parking in Baltimore City. One should point out that a majority of the judges on the Court of Appeals, our state supreme court, were appointed by Democrats so one should be careful not to label it a partisan machination by manipulative Republican judges. I don't know yet if the judges are being cramped in their interpretation of the constitution. However, they are certainly moving deep into the political thicket. The Court of Appeals voided portions of the state redistricting plan not so long ago.

The ruling on early voting causes very serious problems for Maryland's upcoming election. The first absentee ballots went out last week. Candidates have already mailed literature to absentee voters to solicit votes. I have been working for a candidate who mailed literature to one absentee voter in Vanuatu the other day. It is unclear how the state will deal with this problem. One idea is that they will allow people to submit another absentee ballot if they so choose. Others think they may need to remail all ballots because Perez voters may not hear of the decision and should have to take an active step to reclaim their vote. The state also needs to reprint all of the absentee ballots yet to go out and reprogram all of the state's voting machines. It is a mystery to me how they plan to accomplish this in a timely fashion.

Tom Perez was probably going to come in a respectable third in the primary for attorney general. I served as the moderator in the first attorney general debate and can assure you, however, that he was a serious candidate and certainly qualified by any reasonable measure. He teaches and has practiced law and is currently the Montgomery County Councilman from District 5 which has around 180,000-200,000 residents and has served as President of the Council of this County of nearly 1 million people.

He is one of the most important and promising Latino elected officials in the state. He also has a good sense of humor. When I checked on how to pronounce his name, I mentioned that I didn't want to confuse him with the former Israeli Prime Minister. Without missing a beat, he replied, "You mean cousin Shimon?" I bet he did just fine in the Jewish precincts of his district.

Amending the constitution to allow early voting or weaken the requirements to hold the office of attorney general requires a fair amount of consensus as it requires a three-fifths majority in both houses of the General Assembly before it goes before the voters. The initiative does not exist in Maryland though some laws can be petitioned to referendum, something that mercifully does not occur with great regularity. While we usually have a few relatively dull state constitutional and county charter amendments on the ballot, we do not have anything like the situation in California where voters confront pages of ballot initiatives. When abortion became a big issue in the 1970s, changes were made by booting out pro-life Democrats instead of through the initiative. We did get to vote on gun control directly once.