The Montgomery County Council sent a letter to House Speaker Adrienne Jones and Senate President Bill Ferguson urging a state constitutional amendment to modernize the standard for putting local ballot measures before voters.
Article XI-A of the Constitution of Maryland requires potential charter amendments to receive the signatures of 20 percent of the jurisdiction’s registered voters or a minimum of 10,000 signatures.
In larger jurisdictions , this numeric “cap” represents a vanishingly small share of the electorate — and not every ballot question receives thorough vetting and scrutiny from the media or interested parties.
The 10,000-signature threshold is excessively high for smaller jurisdictions. For instance, Kent County, with a population of 19,200 according to the 2020 census, would require signatures from over half its residents to meet this requirement. Not all residents are registered voters, so achieving this threshold is practically impossible.
At the time this constitutional provision was ratified in 1978, Montgomery County had a population of 584,000. Today, Montgomery County has a population of over one million residents.
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The current 10,000 signature threshold equates to 2.9% of Montgomery County’s electorate, based upon the 343,371 residents who voted for governor in 2022. Viewed a different way, the 10,000 signature threshold is equivalent to only 1.5% of the county’s 684,032 actively registered voters.
A proportional approach could better reflect the diverse population sizes across Maryland counties, strengthening democracy by ensuring fairer and more attainable standards for all jurisdictions.
Stay tuned to Conduit Street for more information.
