Citizens in Charge

An initiative campaign in Oregon to legalize recreational marijuana has submitted what they believe to be sufficient signatures to qualify for a place on November’s ballot. Proponents of the initiative, a group called New Approach Oregon submitted 145,710 signatures, which is well above the 87,213 verified signatures required.

“We’ve verified many of the signatures ourselves and we will indeed qualify for the ballot,” New Approach Oregon spokesman Anthony Johnson told reporters.

If passed, the initiative would legalize recreational marijuana for those over 21 and allow the state Liquor Control Commission to regulate retailers, processors and growers of the drug.

In Nevada, the deadline for collecting signatures has come and gone, with no citizen-initiated measures able to qualify for this November’s ballot. Petitions were circulated on two conservative-backed measures, but both failed to collect the 101,000 required signatures. One measure would have required voters to present a photo ID at the polls and the other would have blocked state government from setting up a state exchange as part of the national Affordable Care Act.

No citizen-initiated measures have qualified for the Nevada ballot since 2006. 

Measure 1, a constitutional amendment that moves the initiative petition deadline up 30 days – to just before the North Dakota state fair, so that initiative sponsors lose that very important meeting place for gathering signatures – passed narrowly yesterday in a very low turnout primary election.

State legislators introduced the amendment as HCR 3034 and passed it at the request of long-serving Secretary of State Al Jaeger, who argued his office needed more time to review petitions and that more time was also necessary to accommodate legal challenges to ballot measures.

On tomorrow’s statewide primary ballot in North Dakota is Measure 1, a constitutional amendment that would cut 30 days from the signature gathering period, by making the petition deadline 120 days prior to the general election, rather than the current 90 days.

Secretary of State Al Jaeger brought the measure to the legislature in 2013, and a bipartisan majority of legislators jumped at the idea, with 64 percent of Senators and 85 percent in the House voting to put Measure 1 on the ballot.  Jaeger argued the measure will “safeguard the credibility of the petition process.”

The chairman of MDPetitions.com, Maryland Delegate Neil Parrott, announced that his most recent petition effort, a referendum on the so-called “Bathroom Bill,” fell short of its signature collection goal.

The petition needed to collect 18,579 signatures from registered state voters by May 31 and a total of 55,736 by June 30. But only 17,575 signatures had been collected by supporters of the referendum by the deadline.