Paul Hammel / Nebraska Examiner
Volunteers with Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana sort through boxes of petitions submitted just before Thursday’s deadline to submit signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
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Paul Hammel
Nebraska Examiner
LINCOLN — Two well-funded initiative petition drives appear to be headed for a vote in November, while a third — to legalize medical cannabis — looks iffy to gain a place on the ballot.
“We’ll know in the next couple of months if we qualify or not,” said State Sen. Anna Wishart of Lincoln, who co-chaired the signature drive conducted by Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana.
Wishart said the predominantly volunteer effort submitted 93,000 signatures for one of its two petitions, and 91,000 for the other. About 87,000 valid signatures of registered voters are needed to qualify for the ballot.
Election officials say that, typically, between 10% and 15% of signatures submitted for such petition drives are deemed invalid after checking. So that makes it uncertain if the marijuana petition drive will qualify.
“It’s going to be a photo finish,” said Omaha Sen. Wendy DeBoer, who was among those submitting petitions Thursday afternoon at the Nebraska Secretary of State’s Office in downtown Lincoln.
Mad scramble
It was a mad scramble for the medical marijuana group just prior to the deadline as volunteers dug through boxfuls of petitions, which were scattered on the floor outside the election office, to divide them by county and by the two petitions. They crossed their fingers that some petitions from rural Nebraska would also arrive because they must provide a sufficient number of signatures in 38 of the state’s 93 counties.
“This is what a grassroots campaign is,” said Crista Eggers of Omaha, the campaign coordinator for Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana.
The cannabis group gathered more than enough signatures in 2020 to qualify for the ballot. But their issue was tossed off the ballot by the Nebraska Supreme Court, which ruled the initiative violated the state’s “single subject” rule.
This year, after losing major donors, the medical marijuana effort had to rely primarily on volunteers to circulate its petitions.
Others had $1 million
It spent about $200,000, according to Eggers. Meanwhile, the two initiatives that appear to have qualified for the ballot each had war chests of over $1 million.
Citizens for Voter ID, whose leaders said they submitted about 172,000 signatures on Thursday, reported raising $1.7 million to collect signatures and campaign for the idea. That included a $1.5 million donation from Marlene Ricketts, the mother of Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts.
Raise the Wage Nebraska leaders said they submitted 160,000 signatures to qualify their issue — to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026. That group reported raising about $1.3 million so far.
“We weren’t one of the rich campaigns,” Wishart said. That, she said, included being able to afford a signature verification system that gives an accurate count of how many valid signatures have been submitted.
Some signatures uncounted
That means that the signatures submitted Thursday by the Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana are “raw,” Wishart said, and that several hundred signatures may not have been counted since they came in so late.
The voter ID initiative, because it proposes to change the Nebraska Constitution, must provide about 124,000 valid signatures of registered voters in Nebraska to qualify for the ballot. The two other initiatives, because they propose state law changes, only need about 87,000.
