MPP UPDATE #20

By Alison Green, Marijuana Policy Project

October 2006

On November 7, when Nevada voters have the chance to make history -- and worldwide news -- by passing a ballot initiative to end marijuana prohibition in the state, they may not realize how hard their state government fought to keep them from having that opportunity.

The initiative -- which would tax and regulate marijuana in the state -- was originally supposed to be on the ballot two years ago, in November 2004.

But on July 13, 2004, Nevada elections officials announced that they would accept as valid only 34,947 of the 66,000 signatures that the Marijuana Policy Project had turned in to qualify the initiative for the ballot. (51,337 valid signatures were needed.) However, MPP’s internal signature validation had shown that 54,000 of the 66,000 signatures should have been valid.

What accounted for the discrepancy? First, Clark County threw out 19,830 signatures because of a previously unenforced "requirement" that one voter who signs each petition booklet must fill out and notarize the affidavit at the back of the booklet. Yet the state had ignored this “requirement” in previous election cycles, 16 of the 17 counties continued to ignore it, and the AFL-CIO succeeded in court at blocking the "requirement" from taking effect.

Elections officials also threw out thousands of additional signatures from people who they claimed weren't registered voters – even though MPP had registered them and photocopied their voter-registration forms before turning them in.

(Additionally, after the deadline for turning in the signatures MPP’s consulting firm had collected, a box of 6,000 signatures was found in the firm's office. To this day, we don’t know whether an employee of the firm misplaced the box and then found it later, or whether the firm was sabotaged from within. But the box was found sitting on a chair in plain view on June 20. MPP fired the consulting firm.)

In late July, MPP filed suit in federal court to compel the Nevada government to place our initiative on the ballot. And on August 13, 2004, a judge ruled Nevada's process for putting initiatives on the ballot unconstitutional. The ruling threw out part of Nevada's constitution and triggered a statewide recount of the signatures.

But the state government kept fighting. Over the next two weeks, Nevada's elections officials openly broke the law during the recount -- refusing to give MPP copies of our petitions so that we could check the validity of the government workers' recount, and refusing to allow our campaign staffers to observe the recount process -- even though this right was being granted to other initiative campaigns.

On September 1, 2004, after illegally disqualifying thousands of signatures from people who filled out voter registration forms the same day they signed the petitions, the Nevada government announced that MPP’s signatures fell 1,815 short of the total needed. And a week later, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to allow the state's actions.

Undeterred, two months later, MPP turned in 84,665 gross signatures to qualify a new initiative for the November 2006 ballot -- far more than the 51,337 valid signatures that were required. On December 7, 2004, Nevada officially certified that MPP had submitted more than 69,000 valid signatures -- almost 18,000 more than the 51,337 we needed to qualify for the ballot. The path appeared to be clear.

But rather than certifying the initiative for the ballot, the state attorney general announced he was increasing the threshold to qualify from 51,337 to 83,156 -- even though the state had repeatedly cited the lower number, as recently as nine days after MPP turned in its petitions.

As a result, MPP's initiative and two other ballot initiatives were being disqualified from the November 2006 ballot. The move "just boggles my mind," one legislator told the Las Vegas Sun.

On January 12, 2005, MPP and the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in federal court once again.

And on January 28, 2005, MPP won a sweeping victory, when a federal judge ordered the Nevada government to place the initiative on the 2006 ballot. Finding in MPP’s favor on all counts, Judge James Mahan ruled that the state followed an unconstitutional procedure when it rejected the initiative. He ordered the state to immediately send the initiative to the legislature when it convened on February 7. The legislature would then be required to consider our proposal and either pass it into law themselves within 40 days or place it on the November 2006 ballot so Nevadans could vote on it.

Next month, Nevadans will finally have the opportunity to do exactly that -- despite their own state government’s efforts to stand in their way. For information about the campaign, see http://www.regulatemarijuana.org/