Andy Taylor

There was a hearing, but still no ruling quite yet.

Opponents of the city’s legally embattled equal rights ordinance say they collected about 200 more valid petition signatures than they need to trigger a repeal referendum, a figure a district court judge will consider this week as he issues the final ruling in what has a been a lengthy and complicated case.

At a hearing Monday morning, Judge Robert Schaffer said he intends to rule by the end of the week.

[…]

Though the two sides still adamantly disagree on whether the petition was valid, their respective signature tallies are closer together than ever before. The city’s motion for judgment, submitted Friday, leaves the plaintiffs with 16,619 signatures, short of the 17,269 signatures they need.

Andy Taylor, attorney for the plaintiffs, said he intends to submit a count Monday afternoon that credits opponents with about 17,500 valid signatures. He is challenging some of Schaffer’s rulings as to whether certain signatures were legible, among other issues.

Schaffer will now review both motions, reconsidering legibility and challenges to whether or not circulators who signed the petition also signed as voters, as required by City Charter. The plaintiffs also said there were examples of the city eliminating signatures belonging to voters who lived in city limits at the time they signed the petition but have possibly since moved out of Houston.

The city’s attorneys have also argued that plaintiffs are incorrectly matching circulator signatures with those of voters on the petition.

“I feel I was conscientious in what I was doing and how I did my tally,” Schaffer said. “But I’m not perfect and I don’t have a problem or an issue with going over a few more to see if I might have missed one.”

See here for the background. Man, I wish I knew what Judge Schaffer’s tally is, but we’ll have to wait till he’s ready to tell us. HouEquality fills in some details.

When last we checked there were over 5,000 signatures that the City had deemed illegible, and on Friday of last week we were told that opponents were lacking sufficient signatures by about 660. At today’s hearing the attorney for the opposition, Andy Taylor, was attempting to make the argument that some individuals who had been declared invalid because they did not reside within the City of Houston, had simply moved since the time they signed the petition.

Judge Schaffer reminded Mr. Taylor that he had absolutely no evidence to support that claim and when pressed on it Taylor admitted that he was making an assumption to that end.

We have continued to see opponents of HERO moving the goal posts when it comes to this trial. After demanding a trial by jury, which they got, they are now pretending as if the jury’s verdict has no bearing on the final tally. To be clear, the jury uncovered widespread forgeries in the submitted petitions, among other problems. It is easy to see why the Plaintiffs want to ignore the jury’s findings.

The numbers as we know them today are as follows:

The City of Houston is saying they have been able to confirm 16,619 signatures, 650 fewer than required to trigger a referendum vote.

The HERO opponents are not offering a firm number on their count. They are stating that they have validated at least 17,500 (231 over the requirement) and as many as 25,000 signatures – again, they would not offer an actual count.

I’m trying really hard to temper my expectations. That said, the fact that Andy Taylor did not have an exact number as the city did as well as his desperate-sounding attempt to argue that several hundred people might have moved since signing the petition makes me think the plaintiffs have lost and they know it. They’re just making as much noise as they can to make the city look like bullies. One can certainly argue that petitioners deserve a fair amount of latitude, and that in general courts should err on the side of people asking for access to the ballot box. I have expressed such beliefs myself, and I think there should be a fairly lenient standard for counting signatures. On the other hand, one can quite reasonably argue that the plaintiffs have been given a lot of latitude, yet even with that they’re still trying to conjure up new ways for signatures that have been rejected to be accepted instead. The requirements for petition pages to be deemed valid are not burdensome, but these guys failed to meet them despite having the resources to pay circulators and a high-priced attorney like Andy Taylor. Furthermore, while I do believe that in general access to the ballot should be fairly easy to accomplish, we are talking here about an effort to single out a group of people and restrict their rights. The plaintiffs deserve zero sympathy for that. I hope so hard that they get the verdict they have earned. Towleroad has more.

I was expecting this to happen Monday, but apparently Judge Robert Schaffer handed down his ruling about which HERO repeal petition signatures were valid and should be counted on Monday.

Judge Robert Schaffer ruled on which types of signatures can be counted on the petition seeking to overturn the controversial ordinance.

According to the city charter, people gathering signatures, also called circulators, have to sign each page of collected signatures to certify that people signed in their presence. If they fail to do so, all signatures on that page are invalid.

Maybe the most significant finding by the judge is that the pages of those circulators who printed their name within an oath but did not sign underneath, are deemed valid.

Lawyers for the city argued during the trial that those should not count.

That part of the ruling is what makes Andy Taylor, lawyer for the plaintiffs, optimistic.

“It doesn’t matter if you print your name or if you sign your name, as long as it’s your authentic handwriting and you intended to validate the petition when you signed it under oath, that’s good enough,” Taylor says.

But the judge will not count signatures submitted by 12 circulators who gathered a high volume of signatures.

See here and here for the background. Before I go any farther, can someone please explain to me why KUHF appears to be the only local news outlet covering this story? As far as I can tell, the last Chronicle story was on February 13, when the jury verdict was handed down. That was a big deal as it established the facts of the case, but it is Judge Schaffer’s ruling that determines which signatures actually get counted. You’d think that might be worth a blurb or a mention on the teevee, but other than KUHF the only outlet that I can see that had a story was the Christian-oriented World Magazine:

“What it looks like is we go over the top,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Andy Taylor told me in a phone interview Monday. “I’m prayerful that we have enough.”

During a Feb. 19 hearing called by Schaffer to outline the questions he would address in his ruling, defense attorney Geoffrey Harrison pressed Schaffer to adopt the most restrictive interpretation of the Houston City Charter in order to nullify the petition. Schaffer repeatedly rebuffed Harrison and said he would be guided by the jury decision but not bound by it.

“We never had any intention of accepting the jury’s ruling as is,” Schaffer told Harrison during the hearing. “I am going to accept petitions I believe were signed and subscribed. I have said all along that I will.”

While the jury accepted the defense’s restrictive argument mandating petition circulators “sign” and “subscribe” the document’s oath, Schaffer, citing appellate court rulings as his guide, gave a much broader interpretation of that requirement. A single, legible signature—print or cursive—at the bottom of the page sufficed to complete the circulator’s oath, he ruled.

The city’s attorneys argued the jury’s finding of forgery, even if only on one page, should discredit all of a circulator’s work, which could include multiple pages. But Schaffer ruled only the names shown as forgeries—most often “family units” where one family member signed for others—should be dismissed.

Taylor admitted Schaffer’s ruling on one or two other key issues could make the plaintiffs’ victory a narrow one. With both sides recounting the petition signatures—using the jury’s and judge’s rulings as the validation criteria—the process could produce disparate numbers and require clarification from Schaffer. Taylor expects to have a final number in about two weeks.

“Given the judge’s directions provided to the lawyers, I expect the court will apply the law to the verdict and issue a final judgment confirming that the petition failed,” Parker said Monday. “The plaintiffs are expected to appeal any outcome that is not in their favor. That will be unfortunate for the city because the majority of Houston wants this divisive fight to be over so that we are able to provide equal rights protections for all of our residents.”

A copy of Judge Schaffer’s ruling is here, which I found via the HOU Equality Facebook page; they too were expecting a Monday ruling. Taylor’s optimism and the story’s angle kind of elides a big deal for the plaintiffs, namely that all petition pages gathered by the 12 circulators whose pages were found to contain forgeries and whose affidavit oaths were not found to be “true and correct” will be tossed. I wish I had some idea what proportion of the signature pages were the responsibility of these 12, but I don’t. I suspect this will take a big chunk of otherwise verifiable signatures out of play, but who knows? Maybe these pages contained the bulk of the signatures that had been disqualified the first time anyway. We won’t know till everyone shows their hand in two weeks or so. Whatever numbers everyone comes up with, an appeal will follow. Texas Leftist, from whom I got the KUHF link, has more.