A  little-noticed incident in Ellicott City, Maryland highlights the  institutional hurdles and biases against minor political parties,  the harassment of citizens engaged in constitutionally protected  activities by public employees, the hostility on the part of the police  toward those who record their interactions with the public, and the  inaccuracies common in mainstream media reporting.

On  December 18th, a professional petition circulator by the name of Andy  Jacobs was collecting signatures for the ballot access drives of the  state’s Libertarian and Green parties outside a public library in  Ellicott City, Maryland.  Following a dispute with a library employee  who had ordered Mr. Jacobs to move his operation farther away from the  library entrance, the library employee called police.  After the officers  arrived, the library employee, Stacey Freedman, ordered Jacobs to leave  the grounds, stating that he did not have permission to circulate his  petitions there.  The officers threatened Jacobs with arrest if he did  not follow the order, at which point Jacobs stated that he would leave  after recording the conversation and the order on his cell phone.   Jacobs was then allegedly grabbed by police, who tried to take his  phone, an action which he allegedly resisted, and he was then pepper  sprayed and arrested.  Jacobs was subsequently charged with trespassing  and resisting arrest.  This is according to a report on the incident published last week by The Baltimore Sun, as well as an account at the Independent Political Report.

In  states all across the country, third party and independent political  organizations are currently engaged in petition drives to collect the  requisite number of signatures to qualify for ballot access in the  elections of 2012 and beyond.  To qualify for ballot access in Maryland –  which, like many other states, has restrictive ballot access laws for  third party and independent candidates – minor parties must either have a  registered membership equal to at least 1% of all registered voters, or  have garnered at least 1% of the vote in the previous gubernatorial election, or collect 10,000 petition signatures in support  of their ballot access drive.  The Libertarian and Green Parties of  Maryland are both currently engaged in ballot access petition drives for  the 2012 elections.

Though the article on the December 18th incident in The Baltimore Sun  refers to Andy Jacobs as “a Green Party operative,” Jacobs is actually a veteran professional petition circulator and a member of the  Libertarian Party.  Over the course of the petition drive in question,  Jacobs had been gathering signatures for both the Libertarian and the  Green Parties, according to the account by a fellow circulator at Independent Political Report.   As reported by Ballot Access News, the petition deadline for minor  parties that wish to obtain or regain qualified status in Maryland is  not until August 2012.  However, minor parties that were on the ballot  in 2010 were told by election officials that if they did not submit  those petitions by January 7, 2011, their party members would lose their  registration status.  In his report on this development, Richard Winger  commented, “In other words, if the Constitution, Green and Libertarian  Parties want their registered members to continue to be registered in  those parties, those parties had to rush their 2012 petition.”  It is  for this reason that Andy Jacobs, among others, was gathering signatures  in Maryland for the 2012 presidential election in December of 2010.   This month, the Green and Libertarian Parties respectively submitted  14,842 and 13,787 signatures to meet the requirement of 10,000 valid  signatures.  Third parties often submit petitions with signature totals  far exceeding the required number because Democratic and Republican  party operatives routinely challenge third party ballot access petition  signatures in the hope of denying those parties access to the ballot.

According  to Paulie Cannoli, the petition circulator who published an account of  his experiences collecting signatures in Maryland for this drive,  circulators “are frequently harassed in public places where the right to  petition has been legally established, by government employees who are  not aware of the relevant court cases.”  While working in front of the  same library as Jacobs, but on a different occasion, Cannoli says, he  too was told by library employee Stacey Freedman that he was “not  allowed to petition there.”  Cannoli also recounts a similar incident with  the manager of another branch of the public library in East Columbia  Maryland.  The Chairman of the Maryland Green Party, Brian Bittner,  highlighted the Catch-22 confronting minor parties in the article for The Baltimore Sun:

“Bittner took issue with being required by state law to collect  signatures, then encountering resistance from public employees. "Not  only are we required to do it, but we can't do it here" seems to be a  contradictory message, he said.”

A  final troubling aspect of the Jacobs incident is the hostility of  police toward an individual seeking to record an interaction with law  enforcement officers.  Cannoli writes:

“what prompted the arrest was not  refusing to leave, which Andy agreed to do even though numerous rulings  all the way up to the Supreme Court say he had a right to be there, but  because he wanted to have a record of being ordered to leave.”

One  might be tempted to disregard such a conclusion if there were not so  much evidence of hostility toward citizens who seek to hold them  accountable for their actions by creating a recording of police  encounters with the public.  In one highly publicized case from last  year, motorcyclist Anthony Graber was charged by police with a felony  violation of Maryland wiretapping laws for recording a police officer  without his consent after placing a helmet-cam video of his receipt of a  speeding ticket at the barrel of a gun on Youtube.  The wiretapping  charges against Graber were eventually dropped when the judge in the  case ruled that the wire tap law does not apply in situations where  there is no expectation of privacy.

As Radley Balko recently wrote in a lengthy article for Reason Magazine: “It has never been easier – or more dangerous – to record the police.”