Mar 14, 2008  |  By: JOSHUA LYNSEN  | COMMENTS     

Equality Maryland is working to save a transgender rights law that’s in jeopardy by taking the case to court.

Dan Furmansky, the organization’s executive director, said a lawsuit expected to be filed this week would seek to overturn a petition with 32,000 signatures opposing the Montgomery County law.

He said a preliminary review of the petition shows it has many questionable signatures, including some duplicates and potential forgeries.

“Obviously, we need to be prepared for this to go to referendum,” Furmansky said, “but we wouldn’t be filing this lawsuit if we didn’t believe that the Board of Elections failed to do its job and that an alarming number of signatures were invalidly obtained.”

A copy of the lawsuit, slated to be filed in circuit court in Rockville, was not available by Blade deadline.

Michelle Turner of Citizens for a Responsible Government, the organization that coordinated the petition, said she doesn’t understand why Equality Maryland is trying to stop the referendum.

“I think this sends a message that Equality Maryland might be worried that maybe they don’t have as broad a support as they thought,” she said, “and maybe the citizens of Montgomery County want to have the opportunity to vote.”

Furmansky said Equality Maryland has “no doubt” that it can win the vote.

“But it will be a costly and time-consuming endeavor to get accurate information into the public sphere,” he said. “And most importantly, this CRG has infiltrated the Democratic process and shouldn’t get a free pass if they deliberately turned in falsified and erroneous signatures.”

Turner said each petition page bore a summary of the law, and signature collection sites displayed complete copies of the law.

“We collected over 32,000 signatures,” she said. “The Board of Elections confirmed that [at least] 26,000 of them were valid.”

That certification March 7 cleared the way for a November vote on the law that prohibits “discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, cable television service and taxicab service on the basis of gender identity.”

Montgomery County Council members unanimously passed the law last year. It was set to go into effect last month, but remains suspended until the petition is overturned or voters ratify it.

Although coordinated and backed by Equality Maryland, the lawsuit is expected to name as plaintiffs about one dozen Montgomery County voters.

“It’s going to be a cross section of folks,” Furmansky said. “Clergy, business owners, some transgender people, some civil rights leaders.”

He said the plaintiffs would argue that the Board of Elections did not sufficiently examine the petition that Citizens for a Responsible Government submitted.

“We’ve hired an attorney, we’ve hired an organizer and we have dozens of volunteers sitting in a room poring over these petitions,” Furmansky said. “The county Board of Election doesn’t have this sort of capacity and didn’t take it upon itself to find a way to create that capacity.”

But he acknowledged that the situation is one the county rarely tackles.

“Referendum efforts are few and far between in the county,” Furmansky said. “Clearly, the Board of Elections was out of its element.”

Marjorie Roher, a Board of Elections spokesperson, said officials “followed the procedure outlined in the law” and are “confident that everything we did was to the letter of the law.” She declined to comment on the lawsuit.

“Until we actually see whatever’s filed and know specifically what they’re talking about,” she said, “we’re not going to make a comment.”

Furmansky said the lawsuit’s filing would trigger a scheduling conference to set deadlines for discovery and other legal steps. He noted the case, estimated to cost $50,000 or more, “could very well go into the summer.”

Turner, however, said resolution in the case could take even longer.

“Considering the way the judicial system moves around here, this could still be going on in December,” she said. “And I would think that at this point, Equality Maryland would have a difficult time finding a judge who would issue a restraining order or block this from being on the November ballot with this many signatures collected.”