A little bit of everything
In a Maryland Court of Appeals hearing Wednesday, opponents of Maryland’s newly redrawn state legislative map claimed that the state is violating a provision of the state constitution by crossing county boundaries for unnecessary, partisan purposes when creating senatorial districts Sidebar: Voters retain three judges on the court.
Read moreIn a state already dominated by Democrats, Maryland voters further consolidated the party’s power Tuesday.
The voters defeated the longest serving Republican congressman, clobbered congressional challengers to six Democratic incumbents, and approved all the ballot measures the great majority of Republican legislators had opposed, including same-sex marriage and expanded gambling.
Read moreMaryland Democrats, particularly Democratic women, clobbered Republicans in early voting turnout. It’s hard to say what impact this huge Democratic turnout might have for the final results, since no Democratic incumbents in Maryland are considered vulnerable.
Read moreWhen Del. Neil Parrott was gathering petition signatures to put congressional redistricting on the ballot so voters could overturn it, he found that all he needed to do was show people the map itself and they were ready to sign on.
That’s the same appalled reaction I found last week when I made a presentation on Question 5 to students and staff at the University of Maryland Baltimore. All they had to do was look at the map, particularly the lines for the 3rd Congressional District, to realize there was something very wrong.
Read moreMontgomery County “good government” Democrats are organizing their opposition against the “atrocious gerrymandering” in the congressional redistricting that is on the ballot for voter approval as Question 5.
Read moreMaryland is still the undisputed U.S. champion when it comes to drawing sprawling, weirdly shaped congressional districts, according to a soon-to-be-released national study. Maryland has the least compact congressional districts in the nation, based on four mathematical tools for compactness, Azavea, a geographic information services firm in Philadelphia, plans to report in a white paper.
Read moreGay rights activists, religious leaders and politicians are gearing up for two months of campaigning on the Maryland referendum to strike down same-sex marriage legislation that passed in March.
Hot off the political conventions in Tampa and Charlotte, volunteers will be staffing nightly phone banks, canvassing door-to-door and finding ways to make same-sex marriage a personal issue for voters.
Read moreThe energy, excitement and raw emotion was undeniable as an estimated 1,000 “dreamers” showed up at CASA de Maryland’s Langley Park center Wednesday for its inaugural application clinic, kicking off President Obama’s new deferred deportation program.
Read moreAt the Rockville campus of Montgomery College, where the Maryland Dream Act debate began, Sixth District Congressional candidate John Delaney told the crowd of Latino students he strongly supported the federal Dream Act and a “clear and short path” to citizenship for the country’s undocumented population.
Read moreRepublicans hoping to overturn Maryland’s gerrymandered congressional districts are sounding desperate to collect enough by the deadline at midnight Saturday.
They say they need to collect 7,000 signatures to be on the safe side to put the redistricting map on the ballot with a total of 55,736 valid signings.
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