Petition Form Creation
If you are a registered voter in the state of Maryland, please fill out this form to get our candidatesback onto the November 6, 2012 General Election ballot. After we locate your voter record, we'll be able to tell you if your name was submitted in the 2011 petition drive. We are not asking you toregister Libertarian, or even to vote for our candidates. This just gives Maryland voters a choiceother than Democrat or Republican when casting their votes. In order to get the Board of Election's information onto the form, you need to provide sufficient data to find your record in their database. In this day and age, many of us are reticent to provide personal information (with good reason) and you may be reluctant to enter it here. But the BoE already has this information -- it is entered here only for matching and validation purposes. We send these forms to the state government for processing. So you are not putting yourself in jeopardy (honest!). Please fill in the information fields below -- if anything is in the slightest way incorrect, they will not count your effort!
Calling all Maryland Registered Voters!
The fine print (background information)
In Maryland, political parties other than Democrats and Republicans must submit a "New Party Petition" every four years to be (re-) recognized by the State Board of Elections (BoE). This permits us to place candidates on the General Election ballot. While this is an onerous task, the Libertarian Party of Maryland (us, the MdLP), the Green, and the Constitution parties have managed to accomplish it in recent memory. For reasons unrelated to those political parties, the standards that the BoE uses to recognize or strike out individual names of voters who signed these petitions has evolved -- into a more stringent requirement. The BoE identified over 12,000 of the signatures the MdLP turned in in the the spring of 2011 as belonging to valid Maryland voters, yet invalidated thousands of them for various technical reasons. The predominant reason was the voter not including a middle initial, using a nickname, or something related to the precise name the BoE has on file as compared to the name submitted on the petition form. As a result, we did not reach the required level of 10,000 signatures to retain state recognition.
We filed a lawsuit to contest the overly stringent signature requirements. On June 21, 2011 the judge agreed with us and filed a summary judgement in our favor in Libertarian Party of Maryland and Maryland Green Party v. Maryland State Board of Elections. The MdLP was immediately re-recognized as a political party by the BoE.
The BoE filed an appeal to the lower court ruling. On March 2, 2012, oral arguments were presented to the Maryland Court of Appeals. In the mean time, the MdLP was active and nominated candidates for all U.S. Congress positions. On May 21, 2012, the Court of Appeals rendered their unanimous decision: the BoE was correct in every detail and the Libertarian and Green Parties were wrong on every detail of the court case. The court ordered the BoE to immediately de-certify those parties. The only certified parties in the state of Maryland now are the Democrats and Republicans. The BoE requires thousands of additional petition signatures to augment those which it did accept in order to reinstate the MdLP.
To summarize: the MdLP submitted over 13,000 signatures of Maryland registered voters to "renew" our political status in the spring of 2011; the BoE invalidated far more than had been usual in the past; the MdLP won a legal case re-recognizing us and putting our candidates on the ballot; the BoE appealed; the highest court in Maryland overturned the lower court ruling, de-certifying us and removing our candidates from the ballot.
Now, we need to collect thousands of more signatures that the BoE cannot refute to be reinstated (again) and get our candidates back onto the ballot for the November 6, 2012 General Election.We need your help. We have little time to collect the petition signatures and we cannot afford to have the BoE invalidate a large percentage of them yet again. This webpage lets you create a personalized petition form with your printed information that is extracted from the BoE database. All you need to do is print it out, sign it, and mail it in (sorry, the BoE does not allow for online-only petitions) -- it will have to be accepted, as a match to their records is guaranteed.
This webpage creates a petition sheet with just one name and signer -- yours. And it has been pre-validated. We strongly encourage all to use this method. Print out personalized sheets for each person signing. It is a bit wasteful of paper, but is worth the trouble. If you really, really want to do it manually (discouraged), here is a blank petition form and here is some good advice.
--Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
No comments:
Post a Comment