Lacking the substantial financial support of prior contributors, Nebraskans for Medical Cannabis is unlikely to obtain the required number of signatures to present two complementary legalization initiatives to voters in November.
According to a news statement from the group, campaign chairwoman Crista Eggers stated that each of the campaign’s two petitions received roughly 67,000 signatures as of July 1.
Each proposition in the grassroots initiative campaign must receive around 87,000 valid signatures (7% of Nebraska’s registered voters) by the deadline of July 7 in order to be placed on the state’s ballot. In order to account for signatures that cannot be verified due to invalid handwriting or signers who are not actually registered to vote, Nebraskans for Medical Cannabis plans to submit 110,000 signatures per petition.
In the release, Eggers stated, “I cannot be more clear. Without tens of thousands of Nebraskans signing this weekend, we might not be able to deliver our signatures to the Nebraska Secretary of State by the deadline of July 7th. We have not yet hit the necessary threshold, we are not focusing on going overage.
In a June 22 press conference, Eggers, whose 7-year-old son Colton experiences up to 100 epileptic seizures every day, pleaded with fellow Nebraskans to sign the petitions. At that time, the group had collected about 60,000 signatures for each proposal.
Associated: Medical Cannabis in Nebraska About 50K Signatures Short
After losing two of its biggest supporters from its 2020 election campaign, Nebraskans for Medical Cannabis is making a push in 2022. In 2020, the group gathered the necessary signatures for the ballot, but the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that the petition violated the state Constitution’s single-subject restriction.
Since then, two campaign donors have lost their lives—one in a plane disaster and the other was identified as having a terminal illness—leaving the 2022 organizers to rely primarily on volunteers to draft this year’s supplemental petitions, which must adhere to the single-subject restriction.
The first petition seeks to substitute the phrase “access to cannabis in all its forms for medical purposes” for the phrase “right to possess, grow, sell, and use medical cannabis” in the state constitution. And the second petition seeks to prevent qualifying patients and those who are in charge of them from being arrested for using medical cannabis as prescribed by a physician.
Nebraska is one of the 13 states that still forbid the use of medical marijuana with low THC limits. Possession of between one and one and a half pounds of cannabis is currently a misdemeanor punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine.
Although Nebraskans for Medical Cannabis’s signature drive will be competitive, the organization averaged fewer than 1,000 signatures each day between its published results from June 22 to July 1.
To deliver the required 87,000 signatures to the secretary of state, the campaign would need to collect about 3,000 signatures every day on average during its last week.
