which he seeks office as long as he resides
anywhere in that senate district. In other
words, if one is a resident of any one of the
three house districts which compose a
single senate district, he may qualify to
run for the House; in order to run for
the Senate he must naturally have resided
within the district itself for at least six
months.
Now, recognizing that reapportionment
and redistricting is going to cause and
continue to cause hardships, a provision
was added to try to take care of those who
found themselves districted out of their
old seat, or districted out of their old dis-
trict if one were not an incumbent but
merely one who sought office following a
redistricting. What the Committee agreed
upon was the compromise that if after re-
districting one found that his old district
were gone, and he no longer resided in it,
he would have the option of running either
in the new district in which he found him-
self or in his old district if his old dis-
trict or portion thereof contained 50 per
cent of the population of the old district.
This does not take care of all the in-
equities because if the old district were
divided into three even parts, 33 and 1/3
per cent would be spread around, and the
option would not apply. Similarly if the old
district were divided into four equal parts,
and there were a 25 per cent spread, there
would be no option because there would be
no former place of abode, so to speak, for
office-seeking purposes, which contained 50
per cent of the old district. However, by
and large it was thought impossible to go
into the minutiae and detail in the Con-
stitution to the point where one could
guarantee everyone who was dislodged as
a result of redistricting an opportunity to
run in more than one district. Under some
circumstances, and perhaps ideally it may
represent 90 per cent of the time, if one
finds oneself in a new district, one would
have the choice between running in that
new district or in the old district, pro-
viding that it has retained at least 50 per
cent of the population of the old district.
By the way, it was the problem with
respect to redistricting and reapportion-
ment which caused the Legislative Commit-
tee to veer away from any serious con-
sideration of staggered terms. In actuality,
the suggestion of staggered terms met with
a great deal of appeal by the members of
the Committee on the Legislative Branch,
but the practical difficulties in deciding
who would get staggered out and who
would get staggered in, after every ten |
years, was just too much to try to over-
come. Consequently, we, as you see later
in the report, decided to go with four-
year terms in both the House and the
Senate.
Turning now to section 3.06, the election
of legislators, "a member of the General
Assembly shall be elected by the qualified
voters of the legislative district from
which he seeks election to serve for a term
of four years, beginning on the second
Wednesday of December following his elec-
tion."
As I made allusion to earlier, it had been
the practice in Maryland for many years
to stagger the senate terms. We had also
had some experience with two-year House
terms. However, we have found in the
little over a decade that we have had the
four-year term that it has served quite
well in both the House and the Senate.
One of the great difficulties in imposing a
two-year term upon the lower House or
any house as far as that is concerned, is
that the members are always running for
reelection, as is the case with the Con-
gressmen of the United States in the House
of Representatives. So the Committee felt
that there should be some period of time
during which members of the General As-
sembly should not have to worry about the
business of campaigning, and the four-
year term for both House and Senate was
adopted. It seemed quite attractive. I might
say that Maryland shares the distinction
of using the four-year term for both
houses, only with three other States of the
Union.
An examination of the Constitutions of
the other forty-nine states indicates that
nowhere is there a six-year term com-
parable to the upper chamber of the na-
tional Congress.
Another change from the present Con-
stitution contained in section 3.06 is that
the term will commence at a different time.
Under the present Constitution the term
commences from the day one is elected.
The Committee felt that because of the
uncertainties and vagaries that arose with
respect to certification, recount, official
canvass, and challenge, it was somewhat
unrealistic to have a term commence im-
mediately with the day of election—tie
votes and things of that nature—and it
thought it a much more appropriate prac-
tice to begin the term from four to five
weeks after the election. You will note,
therefore, that we used the second Wednes-
day of December following the election as
the commencement of the term. |
