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(photo: eggrole / flickr)
Despite early positive signs that a medical marijuana initiative was going to make the ballot in North Dakota this November, it was not certified by the Secretary of State. The reason it failed to make the ballot is the several college students hired to collect signatures, instead of working allegedly decided to write in fake names. From the Bismarck Tribune:
Eleven paid petition circulators have been charged with facilitating election fraud and filing false statements in gathering signatures for two proposed November ballot measures.
Secretary of State Al Jaeger announced Tuesday morning that the fraudulent signatures have disqualified the proposed state conservation fund measure and medical marijuana initiatives from the ballot.
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With the medical marijuana initiative, a total of 7,559 signatures were rejected. The sponsoring committee for the medical marijuana initiative had turned in 20,092 signatures. The rejected signatures dropped the total signatures to 12,533, or 919 short of the 13,452 needed for the statutory initiative to appear on the ballot.
This is a disappointing setback that appears caused by an outside firm the campaign hired to gather signatures. (Hiring outside firms to gather signatures is a common practice among ballot initiative campaigns.) As a result, it will likely be several more years before medical marijuana is finally approved in North Dakota.
This failure means that ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana will only appear on the ballot in two states this November, Massachusetts and Arkansas. In both those states the initiatives have already been certified to appear before the voters.
4 Comments
i worry that these pot initiatves are put on the ballot to create a conservative backlash to either win the election, or at least create appearances of conservative popularity that provides cover when computer based fraud hands the election to the republicans.Look at the results of the Nixon admin decriminalization study. It directly lead to an upsurge of right wing religious politicalization and conservative turnout (or the appearance thereof) i am very skeptical of hackable electronic voting systems. as fdr said ” nothing in politics is coincidence”
Should have sold it as an initiative in support of fracking, then it could have been passed by acclamation.
I’m not so sure it would have passed there anyway. NorDaks are pretty staid at the ballot. I’m surprised there was an initiative there. Better turf elsewhere for leading the charge.
Could the signature collectors have been plants to poison the well?
Signature collectors were allegedly among the stars of last year’s national champion football team. This has stirred a lot of pots [sorry, couldn't resist....] among the mighty, mighty Bison and football fanatics here in l’il ol’ ND.