Posted: 8:01 pm Wed, June 2, 2010
By Liz Farmer
Daily Record Business Writer
ANNAPOLIS — Opponents of a slots casino planned near the Arundel Mills mall wrapped up their defense Wednesday in a hearing to decide whether the county elections board erred in approving their petition to put the development to a countywide vote this fall.
In a continuation of closing arguments that began Friday afternoon, attorneys for the opponents (which include the Maryland Jockey Club) set out to rebut claims by the casino developer David Cordish that thousands of petition signatures should not have been validated by the Anne Arundel County Board of Elections this spring.
PPE Casino Resorts Maryland LLC, a Cordish Cos. subsidiary, is suing the elections board in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court, challenging the process by which the 22,967 petition signatures of the 40,408 submitted by casino opponents were verified.
Attorneys for the casino opponents spent Wednesday morning and a good part of the afternoon arguing that PPE Casino Resorts was seeking to “disenfranchise” voters and pointing out what they called flaws in PPE’s arguments.
On a point-by-point basis, Bruce Marcus addressed each of the plaintiff’s submitted 19 categories of signature defects, which included missing or incomplete dates, signatures not exactly matching the printed name and one person appearing to sign for both husband and wife. For each category of alleged defects, Marcus took several signatures PPE is calling invalid and argued why those signatures should be counted.
PPE attorneys say more than 9,000 signatures are invalid. If 4,175 of the more than 23,000 approved signatures are rejected, the petition would fail.
Instead of a trial, the case is an administrative review, meaning the judge’s role is to review the process by which the county elections board validated signatures.
Taking PPE’s argument that signature lines that had edits to the information, such as an added middle initial or a corrected date, are defective, Marcus said there was no evidence those edits were made by anyone other than the signer. In some instances, he pointed out signature lines where the signer initialed next to his or her edit.
“The reality is you’re going to have to engage in rank and utter speculation,” Marcus said. “The signature’s good, there’s no doubt about that.”
In other instances where PPE’s claims signatures are illegible or appear to be forged for a husband or wife, Marcus displayed some of those signers’ voter registration records showing the signatures appeared to match.
“Before I would accuse citizens of Anne Arundel County or public officials … of fraud and misconduct, those charges must be carefully evaluated and made in good faith,” Marcus said. “We cannot have people coming into courts and making claims about election boards not doing their jobs. It’s like screaming fire in a movie theater.”
PPE attorney Stephen Anthony then spent the rest of the afternoon attacking Marcus’ arguments as he started his rebuttal closing statement and went until court adjourned at 4:30 p.m.
While Anthony admitted some mistakes had been made in their analysis of the petition signatures and apologized, he said those oversights did not take away from the “thousands” of signatures they contend were counted by the election board and are truly invalid.
“There’s been a lot of inflammatory talk about how we’re disenfranchising people and misleading the court,” he said after characterizing Marcus’ closing argument as laden with “dramatic flourish.”
He pointed out what PPE is calling irregularities in the election board’s evaluation of signatures. Sometimes, entire pages of signatures were disqualified because the petition circulator had incorrectly filled out the date. But in other pages where the circulator’s date was “unreadable,” the page of signatures was counted by the board, Anthony said.
“What’s being suggested is, it’s OK to have some unexplained inconsistencies … but heaven forbid we come into this court in instances where the circulator [was inconsistent] and we’re being accused of being arbitrary and capricious,” Anthony said.
PPE is expected to wrap up its rebuttal Thursday morning, one week after closing arguments began. Judge Ronald A. Silkworth is expected to issue a written opinion for this case, attorneys said.