Chapter 6 making objections to the petition, and so on, were very short, ranging from “forthwith” to two weeks. The petitioners needed a number of signatures that equaled 15% of the voters at the last general election, which was 3,275 voters. After all of the procedural steps were taken and the signatures counted and examined, the board of registrars certified that there were 4,250 signatures, which was more than enough to hold a recall election. The city council notified the mayor, and within the 48 hours given under the law, she filed objections to the board’s certification. The court issued a preliminary injunction against the board’s certification, delaying it until after the board held a hearing on the mayor’s objections. During the 14-day statutory period, the board held over 22 hours of hearings with 58 witnesses and 64 exhibits. As a part of her evidence, the mayor presented a handwriting expert who concluded that 1,722 of the 4,250 signatures were forgeries. In the end, the mayor proved to the satisfaction of the board that there were at least 976 invalid signatures, meaning that the petition did not have enough signatures to force a recall election. But this case is not about recall elections. Nor is it about recall election petitions, or forgeries or preliminary injunctions. This case is about the standard of review: the boundaries within which an appellate court must remain when reviewing the decision of a board or lower court. The standard of review controls how much of a lower court’s decision the appellate court can and cannot change. While the court in Stapleton bases its comments on Massachusetts statutes, the standards contained in those statutes are applied universally. First, the court looked at the options it had. The Court may affirm, remand, set aside or modify the Board’s decision if it determines the decision is unsupported by substantial evidence, was based upon an erroneous interpretation of the law, or was arbitrary or capricious…The board’s decision will be upheld if supported by substantial evidence… Then the court set out the basic rule for reviewing the administrative board’s treatment of the evidence that was presented to the board. To the extent that the agency makes a determination of fact, the agency’s finding must be permitted to stand unless it is unsupported by substantial evidence in the entire record… At 3. There is a very good reason that a reviewing court pays such fealty to the decision of a first-level administrative board or a trial court, and the court in Stapleton gave a very good statement of it. Since the agency has been entrusted with the function of applying its administrative expertise to the determination of complex social, economic, and technical issues, the role of the judiciary in reviewing administrative agency actions is not to substitute its own view of the rightness of [sic] correctness of the agency’s decision for that of the agency. Traditional judicial review requires that the judiciary sustain and support the administrative agency’s decision regardless of whether or not the reviewing Court believes it would have reached the same decision if it had been given initial decisional responsibility for the decision. At 3 (emphasis supplied). 123