Nebraska man charged with 24 misdemeanors for notarizing forged cannabis signatures, AG says

Nebraska prosecutors charged a York man Wednesday with two dozen misdemeanors for his alleged role in notarizing dozens of false signatures a circulator forged earlier this year while working for a group seeking to legalize medical marijuana through a pair of ballot initiatives, the Attorney General’s Office said.

Hall County prosecutors charged Jacy Todd — who owns a CBD shop in Grand Island — with 24 counts of official misconduct, a class II misdemeanor punishable by up to six months incarceration and a $1,000 fine. 

The charges against Todd are the latest to emerge from Attorney General Mike Hilgers’ ongoing investigation into fraudulent signatures found on petition pages submitted in support of the effort to legalize medical cannabis this November.

The effort came under scrutiny last month when Hilgers announced that prosecutors had charged Michael Egbert of Grand Island with a felony for allegedly falsifying more than 200 signatures while working as a paid circulator for the campaign.

In a news release Thursday, Hilgers’ office said investigators uncovered evidence that Todd had notarized petition pages outside the presence of petition circulators, including Egbert, in violation of the state’s notary laws.

Egbert told deputies he would drop off his petition pages at Todd’s CBD shop, Herban Pulse, after he had signed the circulator’s oath at home, Hall County Deputy Donavon Fowler wrote in a court filing.

Egbert told deputies he had never signed the petition pages in the presence of Todd, as required, Fowler wrote. Investigators determined Todd notarized 108 petition pages that Egbert submitted, none of which Egbert signed in Todd’s presence.

Todd notarized the 108 petition pages across 24 separate days spanning from January into early July, leading to the 24 charges against him.

A call to the man’s Grand Island smoke shop went unanswered Wednesday. He does yet not appear to have an attorney representing him in the case, according to initial court filings.

It’s unclear if he knew whether Egbert had allegedly forged the signatures.

Still, Hilgers’ office cast the charges against Todd as “part of an effort to protect the integrity of Nebraska’s ballot initiative process.”

“Election integrity is the bedrock of our democratic republic, and the public expects that those seeking to put an issue on the ballot follow the law,” Hilgers said in Thursday’s news release.

“And this is particularly true where notaries are involved in the election process. Notaries are officers of the public and held to a higher standard of trust and honesty. Here, our investigation uncovered a significant abuse of the notary process and the false representations that petitions were properly notarized when, in fact, they were not.”

In his own statement, Hall County Attorney Marty Klein credited the latest criminal charges to the Hall County Election Commission’s “diligence and thoroughness in the petition signature verification” and the work of Hall County Sheriff’s investigators.

“Voters in Hall County should be confident in signing petitions and casting their ballots in Hall County,” Klein said.

The investigation into the falsified signatures — which Hilgers said Thursday is ongoing and is not limited to Hall County — has not impacted the status of the two petition drives Egbert had worked for.

After tossing the signatures election officials couldn’t verify, Secretary of State Bob Evnen certified Nebraska’s general election ballot last month with both medical cannabis initiatives set to go before voters.

“I am certifying the petitions because, at this point, they appear to have met the threshold signature requirements,” Evnen said last month. “That could change in light of the Attorney General’s investigation. Both cannabis petitions will appear on the ballot, but a court could order later that the initiatives be thrown out.”

Each of the two petitions exceeded a number of signatures equal to 7% of registered voters statewide while also getting the names of 5% of voters in 38 of Nebraska’s 93 counties.

The petitions qualified in 52 counties, according to Evnen’s office, comfortably meeting the requirements to qualify for the ballot regardless of the alleged fraud at play in Hall County.