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The ACLU of Maryland's Legislative Program reflects the commitment of our organization to speak strongly for civil liberties in a challenging political environment. We represent ACLU members throughout Maryland on a wide range of civil liberties issues, including voting rights, criminal justice, civil rights, reproductive freedom, privacy, public education reform, and freedom of expression.

Representing the ACLU in Annapolis during the 2007 General Assembly are our first-ever legislative director, Cindy Boersma, who manages our advocacy work in Annapolis; Bebe Verdery and contract lobbyist Barbara Hoffman, who focus on public school funding and reform issues; and ACLU's public outreach director, Meredith Curtis.

VOTING RIGHTS
REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM
EDUCATION REFORM
DUE PROCESS/CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM
GLBT RIGHTS
RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
PRIVACY
IMMIGRANTS RIGHTS
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VOTING RIGHTS
The ACLU of Maryland is a leader in Maryland voter protection and education.  We are committed to protecting the integrity of the vote, the right to vote, and full access to the polls.  We seek legislation that strengthens these principles and will continue to oppose legislation that burdens the right to vote or that undermines the integrity of the election process.  

• Voter-verified paper trail.  The ACLU will fight to pass a voter-verified paper trail for elections, which will help ensure much-needed transparency and accountability in our voting system, as well as help restore voter confidence. We are advocating as a member of the Election Integrity Coalition. More information about this issue is available at: http://www.md-eic.org/
• Voter Rights Protection Act of 2007.  Our election protection work and election-day monitoring revealed persistent, significant problems in the administration of elections.  This legislation addresses many of those problems by creating back-up procedures to vote provisionally in any case of voting machine error, requiring extension of polling hours when polls open late, providing access to the courts on election day, mandating comprehensive election judge training and  requiring election judges to comply with federal law on voter identification requirements.
• Ex-offender enfranchisement. The ACLU will fight to restore voting rights to those ex-offenders who have completed their sentence of incarceration and have successfully completed probation or parole.  Disenfranchisement for crimes is rooted in Reconstruction-era attempts to circumvent the 15^th Amendment; it constitutes “civil death” and obstructs a full return to civic life with all of its attendant rights and responsibilities.
• Early voting constitutional amendment. The ACLU succeeded in 2005 in helping enact legislation, and in 2006 overriding a veto of legislation, permitting early voting in Maryland.  The Court of Appeals recently held that a constitutional amendment is required in order for Marylanders to vote (other than by absentee ballot) on a day other than Election Day.
• Election-Day voter registration. This bill will permit eligible voters to register and vote on Election Day. Voter participation increases significantly when states permit eligible voters to register and vote on Election Day.  Disabled voters, mobility-impaired voters, voters whose jobs require frequent relocations and young voters (like college students) are all disenfranchised by inflexible registration deadlines.
• Judicial elections reform. The ACLU will continue to fight for legislation to ensure that unaffiliated voters are no longer effectively shut out from voting for Circuit Court judicial candidates who, although they run as unaffiliated, appear on the ballots in party primaries.
• Defeating voter ID requirements. The ACLU will oppose any bill that would require that voters show identification at the polls.  There has been no demonstrated problem of individual voter fraud in Maryland. And ID requirements disproportionately impact the poor and elderly, who may not have drivers’ licenses or access to a location where they can obtain IDs. In addition, voters must pay fees for such forms of identification, which amounts to an unconstitutional poll tax on voters.

REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM
Maryland has a strong record of protecting our reproductive freedoms, including access of all women to reproductive health care, contraception and education.  Every year sees legislation introduced to restrict or eliminate this access; and every year, the ACLU has been successful with other advocates in defeating any limits.

• Defeating judicial bypass legislation. The ACLU will oppose legislation that forces a minor to go to court before obtaining a legal abortion or that criminalizes physicians for performing legal abortions for minors.
• Opposing state funding of “Crisis Pregnancy Centers.” The ACLU will work to defeat any attempt to spend taxpayer dollars on such centers, which serve a religious mission that oppose a women’s right to reproductive freedom and which often promote faulty and misleading science on reproductive issues.

EDUCATION REFORM
Thousands of children in Maryland attend public schools that lack sufficient funding, certified teachers and facilities that are conducive to learning. Since 1987, the ACLU has advocated for the proposition that the State Constitution guarantees all children in Maryland — including the most disadvantaged and educationally at-risk — an adequate education. The ACLU, working with parents and other coalition partners, will advocate for:

• Full funding of the final year of the “Bridge to Excellence in Public Schools Act.  The Bridge, or “Thornton” law was passed in 2002 with a 6-year phase-in.  The budget that will be passed in this legislative session is slated to include the final, large installment of this funding, critical to moving Maryland schools to the point of providing an adequate education for students.  ACLU will oppose any attempts to reduce this funding.
• Full funding of the Geographic Cost of Education Index (GCEI).  An important part of the Thornton formula, that takes into account higher education costs for certain counties and Baltimore City, has never been included.  ACLU will work aggressively to see that this component is finally mandated by law. 
• Re-establishing equity in the state education funding formula.  The Maryland education formula for many years has been designed to provide more state aid to less wealthy counties that are less capable of raising local revenue.  This provides some measure of equity so that children’s educational needs are met, regardless of the county in which they live.  An unrelated tax code change last year had a negative impact on this formula by measuring county wealth inaccurately.  ACLU will seek to remedy this shift, and re-establish the integrity of the school funding formula.
• School facilities funding.  Many children in Maryland attend decrepit, older schools lacking appropriate heating and cooling systems and other facility basics like science labs and libraries, necessary for a good education.  ACLU will advocate on several fronts to have increased funding move to remedy these conditions: 

* A minimum of $400 million in the capital budget for school renovation/construction;

* Legislation to increase funding for the Aging Schools program, from $10 million to $20 million;

* Legislation to address health & safety deficiencies in schools.

• High School Assessment Task Force.  Students in the class of 2009 must pass 4 high school subject tests to get a diploma.  Tens of thousands of students have failed the tests and risk not graduating if they cannot meet these new standards. ACLU will advocate that legislation establish a state Task Force made up of legislators, education advocates, and others, to address the funding and policy implications of this requirement and the student support and resources that will be necessary to provide to students so that they can meet these standards.

DUE PROCESS/CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM
Since 9/11, the ACLU has been the country’s champion against abuse of power. Nowhere is abuse of power more likely to go unchecked than in the criminal justice system, where abuses lead to erroneous convictions, discrimination, over-use of incarceration and violations of the due process that is the guarantee of our liberty.

• Death penalty repeal. The ACLU will continue to champion repeal of Maryland’s death penalty.  Life without parole is the legal alternative to capital punishment supported by Marylanders. The Court of Appeals recently rejected the state’s lethal injection procedure, reaffirming that the death penalty cannot be carried out consistent with standards of due process and human dignity.
• Accurate eyewitness identification procedures.  The ACLU supports legislation to require police to comply with federal standards for conducting eyewitness identification with photo arrays or line-ups.  Mistaken eyewitness identification is involved in 85% of wrongful convictions nationwide due to police failure to use accurate procedures.
• Videotaping of interrogations. The ACLU supports legislation to require police to videotape interrogations of suspects of violent crimes.  Over 300 law enforcement departments across the country record interrogations, which improves investigations and reduces claims of police brutality and misconduct. 

• Independent crime lab oversight.  The ACLU will promote legislation to establish licensing, standards and surveys of Maryland’s forensic labs consistent with state and federal law governing clinical labs.  Independent crime lab oversight is required by federal law in order for Maryland’s crime labs to receive federal money for crime lab improvements.  It is also required to correct flawed forensic facilities and performance that lead to actual perpetrators remaining at large while the wrong people are prosecuted and convicted.
• RWOC expungement.  The ACLU will continue to work for legislation to allow automatic expungement of public arrest records when an individual is not charged with any crime. Under current law, each arrest is recorded in a statewide database where it remains – affecting opportunities for housing and employment – even when the individual is released without being charged with any criminal conduct.

GLBT RIGHTS
The ACLU works to protect the civil rights of gays and lesbians in Maryland and advocates for fairness and equality for their families in every community and the government.

• Defeating any constitutional amendment banning civil marriage protections for same-sex couples. The ACLU of Maryland, along with our partners at Equality Maryland, has successfully fought off all attempts to pass a state constitutional amendment that would reiterate current law in Maryland denying the legal protections that come with a marriage license to thousands of families headed by same-sex couples. These “marriage amendments” seek to forever enshrine in our state constitution discrimination against families headed by same-sex partners.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
The ACLU believes that the right to practice a religion, or no religion at all, is among the most fundamental of the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. We work to ensure that freedom of religion and belief is protected by keeping the government out of religion.

• Defeating taxpayer subsidies of private schools. The ACLU will continue to oppose bills to funnel taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools, such as tax credits for the private school teachers to get graduate level education.
• Defeating vouchers. The ACLU will work to defeat any attempt to enact private school vouchers, especially for religiously-run schools. We believe that publicly-funded vouchers are part of a political and ideological crusade, not a real plan for public education reform.

PRIVACY
The ACLU works to preserve individuals’ privacy, which has experienced new threats due to the tremendous explosion in surveillance-enabling technologies, combined with the ongoing weakening in legal restraints that protect our privacy.

• Defeating implementation of the federal Real ID Act. The ACLU opposes the Real ID Act, which amounts to an unfunded federal mandate that imposes regulations on the design, issuance and management of state driver’s licenses – turning them, for all practical purposes, into federal identity papers.  Federal law permits any agency regulated by or receiving funding from the federal government to require production of these identity papers. It provides no protection for the private information these cards must contain, including name, address, social security number, biometrics.  This information will be collected and stored by private corporations.   Click here to learn more: http://www.realnightmare.org/
• Protecting personal information privacy. The ACLU supports legislation to help protect consumer information privacy threatened by corporations that mine and gather personal details about the financial lives of Americans for a profit, often without inadequate protections in place.

IMMIGRANTS’ RIGHTS
The ACLU has been one of the nation's leading advocates for the rights of immigrants, refugees and non-citizens, challenging unconstitutional laws and practices, and countering the myths upon which many of these laws are based.

• Free Speech and Association.  The ACLU will oppose any legislation motivated by anti-immigrant sentiment that interferes with the free speech and association rights of immigrants and non-immigrants alike by criminalizing attempts to seek and provide lawful employment, housing and other charitable services in the community.
• Access to driver’s licenses. The ACLU opposes legislation denying drivers’ licenses to persons who cannot prove, to the MVA’s satisfaction, lawful presence in the United States. Such bills do not make Marylanders safer and would have serious unfair consequences to immigrants.
• Defeating “English-Only” legislation. Laws establishing English as the official language are based on the false premise that today's immigrants who come from Asian and Spanish-speaking countries will not learn English without government coercion. The ACLU opposes such laws because they are inconsistent with both the First Amendment right to communicate with or petition the government, and the right to equality.

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