Petition group seeks court’s help again

Molly Ball

Monday, Sept. 13, 2004 | 8:16 a.m.

The group trying to get Nevadans to vote on legalizing small amounts of marijuana has launched a last-ditch attempt to challenge the rule that threw out many of signatures on its petitions.

On Friday, the Committee to Regulate and Control Marijuana asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to have more judges examine its claim that the rule is unconstitutional. A three-judge panel ruled against the petitioners last week.

The move is the last hope for the group, which under current rules has about 1,900 fewer valid signatures than it needs.

"We want to pursue this to its final conclusion," committee spokeswoman Jennifer Knight said on Friday. "We feel like we need to thoroughly explore every possibility before we give up."

The committee's request for more judges, called an en banc review, is a common one, but very few such requests are granted, an information clerk for the San Francisco-based court said.

Knight said the request was made on the advice of the group's lawyers.

The court is expected to act quickly, as the election process is in motion. County election officials across the state are preparing to print sample ballots for the general election, for which early voting begins on Oct. 16.

The process will be disrupted if any changes to the ballot occur after the beginning of this week, Steve George, spokesman for Secretary of State Dean Heller.

If the court found in favor of the marijuana petitioners and ordered the ballot be changed, "the court would have to give us guidance -- should we send out an insert (with the sample ballots), should we mail it separately, or what?" George said.

Last week the a three-judge panel of the court ruled that people are considered registered voters not when they sign a registration form, but when the Election Department receives the form. More than 2,000 signatures were disqualified because people signed the petition and signed up to vote at the same time, and the registrations were not processed on the same day.

Also on the side of the petitioners were the local American Civil Liberties Union and the group behind the "Axe the Tax" petition. However, that group would still have been short of signatures even if the voter-registration rule were invalidated.

If the court puts a final nail in the petition's coffin, the group has not decided whether it would try again in the next election cycle, Knight said. A different version of the marijuana initiative failed before: in 2002, the question made it onto the ballot but was voted down.

This time at least, it may have been an expensive failure. The committee's financial report, filed with the Secretary of State on Aug. 31, lists nearly half a million dollars in expenditures.

Most of the group's funding came from a Washington group, the Marijuana Policy Project, according to the report.