Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston said Monday that the sponsor of a proposed constitutional amendment that would expand the state medical marijuana program did not turn in a sufficient number of signatures to put the measure on the November ballot.
Arkansans for Patient Access, the group backing the amendment, called the decision “arbitrary” and “unfair” in a statement this afternoon and said it plans to pursue legal action against Thurston this week.
The group said the amendment “has been blocked for reasons unrelated to the proposal’s merits, with political motives influencing the decision.”
A constitutional amendment required 90,704 signatures from registered Arkansas voters to make the ballot this year. Thurston said in a letter to the sponsor today that he had certified only 88,040 signatures.
Thurston threw the group’s signature collection into tumult last month when he said he would not count some signatures that had been collected by a canvassing company because paperwork associated with those signatures had not been signed by the amendment’s sponsor. By Thurston’s most recent count, the marijuana group is 2,664 signatures short of the threshold to make the ballot. But, based on Thurston’s previous refusal to count certain signatures, it seems a batch of 18,000 signatures remains uncounted.
The Arkansas Supreme Court is currently weighing the issue of who can sign certain ballot measure paperwork in a separate case regarding casinos. The ruling in that case could determine whether the marijuana group’s uncounted batch of signatures are acceptable. The 18,000 or so untouched signatures might well have enough valid signatures to surpass the 2,664 it still needs to qualify for the ballot.
Bill Paschall, a member of Arkansans for Patient Access, said he was not surprised by Thurston’s decision.
“We think there’s politics involved in the decision not to count some of those signatures,” he said.
Earlier this year, Thurston and Attorney General Tim Griffin put forward a novel argument over who can sign the paperwork associated with gathering signatures for ballot measures. Historically, a paid canvassing company has been allowed to sign certain documents as an agent working on behalf of an amendment’s sponsor. But Thurston and Griffin said state law said otherwise, claiming the sponsor alone can sign the paperwork.
In July, Thurston declined to certify some of the signatures gathered in favor of an amendment that would have restored abortion rights in Arkansas. The sponsor signature issue was one among several raised by Thurston and Griffin. Backers of the abortion amendment took the case to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which eventually rejected the ballot measure but did not rule on the specific issue of whether a sponsor can delegate the duty of signing certain documents to a canvassing company it has contracted with.
A group challenging an anti-casino amendment argued that the amendment’s sponsor, Local Voters in Charge, had allowed a canvassing company to sign documents instead of the sponsor. The Arkansas Supreme Court appointed a retired judge, Randy Wright, as a special master to review the case and making findings of fact. He found that state law does not prohibit sponsors from delegating the duty of signing those documents.
“It would be impractical to find that the named sponsor … could not use authorized persons or entities to do the actual canvassing and managing of the petitioner question,” Wright said in his report.
Griffin said the special master’s conclusion was a matter of law and not a matter of fact and should not be of consequence to the Supreme Court.
Paschall said today that if the Supreme Court affirms the special master’s findings then Thurston would be compelled to count the marijuana group’s as-yet-uncounted batch of 18,000 signatures.
A different ruling, it would seem, would deal a fatal blow to the marijuana amendment.
Constitutional amendments need 90,704 verified signatures to make the ballot in November. On July 5, the signature deadline, Arkansans for Patient Access turned in 111,402 signatures. However, when the secretary of state’s office conducts a review, some signatures are inevitably tossed out as invalid — for example, if a signatory turns out not to be a registered voter.
On July 31, Thurston informed the marijuana group that after this review was completed “there were no less than 77,000 valid signatures,” meaning it needed around 13,000 more signatures to meet the final threshold. Under the law, groups are allowed a 30-day “cure” period to collect new signatures to make up the shortfall after invalid signatures are culled during the review process, so long as they achieve 75% of the total needed (thus, around 68,000 for the marijuana group). The marijuana petitions easily surpassed that mark, so Thurston granted the cure period.
But then, on Aug. 8, Thurston informed the marijuana group of his supposed “discovery” that all of the group’s paid signatures were invalid. However, he declared that the 77,000 signatures he had already certified would remain valid — even though he also claimed in the very same missive that the law demanded that all of those signatures be preemptively disqualified. He would give a mulligan on those, he said. Instead, Thurston explained, he would begin applying the rule only to the additional signatures collected during the “cure” period.
This was a potential problem for the marijuana group. Once they got Thurston’s letter, they could switch to the new rule. But before receiving the letter, prior to Thurston’s policy switcheroo, they had already been turning in new-hire canvasser documentation using the old rule. That put around 18,000 cure-period signatures in jeopardy.
On Aug. 30, the end of its cure period, Arkansans for Patient Access said it turned in 38,934 signatures. Of those, 21,000 were covered by documentation signed by the official sponsor and thus were not in dispute. Another 18,000 or so signatures were covered by documents signed by the canvassing company representatives only, which Thurston said rendered them invalid.
The marijuana amendment would expand access to the state medical marijuana program by expanding the types of medical professionals that could certify patients for the program to include nurse practitioners, physicians’ assistants and pharmacists. The amendment would also allow those medical professionals to certify patients based on any debilitating condition, not just the existing 18 qualifying conditions. The amendment would also extend the length of a medical marijuana card from one year to three years and eliminate the $50 charge for a card. The amendment would eliminate the state restriction that prohibits dispensaries from selling pre-rolled joints and would allow patients to grow some plants of their own.
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