Now, I want to make something clear from the get-go--no one ever said legislative history was easy. Least of all, me. It's detective work, deductive reasoning. It often involves legwork and serendipity. The answers you want are scattered all over, and, occasionally, your resources aren't as forthcoming as you'd like. The recodification project makes a lot of legislative history work particularly murky. It's why you need all this training.
So, what I'd like to do is offer you a glimpse at how a legislative history trace of a random Maryland statute might proceed. I didn't preselect a particularly easy statute, because I wanted to convey the ways in which the resources--especially the Annotated Code--can mislead the unprepared researcher. That said, my hope is that, better armored, better armed, the reader can avoid some of the pitfalls inherent in statutory backtracking.
So, you review the Laws of Maryland 2002, turning to the appropriate Chapter, and discover that it amended two subsections of your statute.
The explanatory note at the beginning of the chapter tells you that it was intended to clarify language in a number of election law statutes--not unusual, and, a further examination reveals, relatively minor:
And this is the relevant text within the law:
