Arkansas’ Secretary of State has disqualified an amendment to expand access to medical marijuana.
Secretary of State John Thurston on Monday said the group Arkansans for Patient Access failed to collect enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. The group had received a 30-day cure period to collect more signatures, but Thurston says they failed to reach the threshold of 90,074 verified signatures.
“Our office determined that 10,521 signatures submitted during the cure period were valid. When that number is combined with the number of signatures previously deemed valid in the submission, the total number of signatures is 88,040,” Thurston said.
If passed, Issue 3 would have expanded the number of conditions which qualify Arkansans to receive medical marijuana. It would have also eased licensing requirements for medical marijuana patients, and expanded the number of healthcare professionals able to prescribe the drug, among other things.
The group behind the proposed amendment responded to Thurston’s decision in a statement Monday, promising legal action against the Secretary of State’s Office.
“Arkansans for Patient Access submitted over 150,000 signatures from all seventy-five counties, demonstrating clear support for an amendment that will remove barriers to access and reduce the cost of obtaining and maintaining a medical marijuana patient card. Unfortunately, excluding 20,000 valid signatures collected during the cure period — due to an arbitrary, last-minute clerical rule change — is unfair and contrary to the democratic process,” the statement reads.
A spokesperson for Arkansans for Patient Access said the group submitted roughly 20,000 more signatures during the cure period, but only about half were verified by the secretary of state.
At issue is a statute that proved fatal to another proposed amendment to legalize abortion this election cycle, that documents confirming training for paid canvassers must be signed by the sponsor of the amendment, not a representative of the company which hires paid canvassers.
“The canvasser registration filings during that period were filed by an agent of the campaign thus in [the secretary of state’s] eyes invalidating those signatures. We maintain that canvasser registration filings are a delegable duty. The special master in the casino case took the same legal view,” said spokesperson Bill Paschall.
Issue 3 will still appear on the November ballot, though, as of Monday, votes for and against it will not count. A statement from the conservative Family Council Action Committee speculates the legal fight over the amendment isn’t over.
“Big businesses have spent nearly two million dollars working to place this marijuana amendment on the ballot. We expect them to ask the Arkansas Supreme Court to overrule the Secretary of State’s decision,” said Family Council Action Committee Executive Director Jerry Cox.
The group Arkansans for Patient Access failed to collect enough signatures to place the amendment on the ballot, Secretary of State John Thurston said Monday. Read More