Washington Post

Sixteen years ago, D.C. activists gathered signatures to let voters decide if the District should be among the first in the nation to legalize medical marijuana. Then Congress stepped in, and city officials were not even allowed to count the ballots that voters had cast.

Enough petition signatures have been verified to place an initiative seeking to legalize marijuana on the ballot this summer in Alaska, election officials said Tuesday.

The petition has met all the thresholds necessary to appear on the Aug. 19 primary ballot, the Alaska Division of Elections said.

The lieutenant governor’s office said it had verified the signatures from registered voters as of Monday evening. The total of 31,500 was a thousand more than needed, with about 6,000 signatures remaining to be checked.

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Corporations and some of the wealthiest Americans have spent more than $1 billion in the past 18 months on ballot initiatives in just 11 states, an unprecedented explosion of money used to pass new laws and influence the public debate.

According to campaign finance reports in 11 states with long histories of initiatives and referendums, the billion dollars spent since the beginning of 2012 is more than has been spent in any two-year period. Supporters and opponents of ballot measures spent nearly as much, $965 million, in 2005 and 2006.

Corporate contributions to city political funds would be banned for the first time if a ballot initiative proposed by a group of District activists succeeds.
 
Bryan Weaver, a former D.C. Council candidate and advisory neighborhood commissioner in Adams Morgan, said he will file papers Tuesday on behalf of the “D.C. Committee to Restore Public Trust” to begin the initiative process.

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Jubilant opponents of Republican Gov. Scott Walker launched their effort Tuesday to try to recall him from office, starting a 60-day blitz to gather more than half a million signatures to force an election next year. The drive to collect an average of 9,000 signatures a day, fueled by anger over Walker’s successful push to take away nearly all public worker collective bargaining rights, began with pajama parties and other events after midnight. Daytime activities included rallies, neighborhood canvasses and booths set up around the state Capitol.

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Opponents of a new Maryland law that would give undocumented immigrants breaks on in-state college tuition have no right to force a referendum, an immigrant rights group charged Monday in a lawsuit seeking to keep the issue off the 2012 ballot.

Casa of Maryland, a group often allied with the state’s Democratic leaders, alleges that state elections officials erred in letting opponents collect signatures to suspend the Maryland DREAM Act, the first state law in 20 years to be halted and sent to the ballot by a petition drive.

Last week, Del. Neil C. Parrott and others won a key victory in their campaign to repeal a new law allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges. Elections officials announced that the opponents had enough signatures to suspend the law and put it to a statewide vote next year.

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The red-robed judges of the Maryland Court of Appeals had tough questions Wednesday for Kevin Karpinski, the lawyer representing Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, peppering him with openly skeptical queries and comments about why thousands of residents who sought to challenge a county law imposing ambulance fees saw their signatures scratched by elections officials.

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Two high-profile ballot initiatives designed to scrap a new ambulance fee and impose term limits for elected officials failed to make the ballot in Montgomery County because of a new standard for signatures that some argue makes it nearly impossible to land voter referendums on the ballot in Maryland, The Washington Examiner reports. The majority of more than 30,000 signatures to do away with the recently adopted ambulance fee aren’t valid, according to local election officials. And the author of a petition to put term limits on the county executive and council expects the same fate.

The D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics ruled Tuesday that a proposed ballot initiative defining marriage as between a man and a woman cannot go forward, reaffirming an earlier ruling that such a vote would be discriminatory.

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Eight opponents of same-sex marriage formally filed a request today with the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics to hold a ballot initiative to stop efforts to allow couples in the District to marry. The one-sentence initiative reads, “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid and recognized in the District of Columbia.” After they dropped off their paperwork, the leader of the group, Bishop Harry Jackson, and the other members of the Stand4MarriageDC coalition stood at Judiciary Square chanting, “let the people vote.”

Proponents of creating a housing and redevelopment authority in Arlington County are planning to appeal a judge’s ruling that struck down their proposal for a ballot referendum in November, prolonging and escalating a battle over affordable housing that dates back several decades.

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