Robert Wolfe, the chief petitioner of a

in Oregon, filed a lawsuit Wednesday charging that Secretary of State Kate Brown has improperly invalidated thousands of voter signatures.

As a result, Wolfe charges, his measure has been unfairly denied a place on the ballot despite turning in 170,000 signatures - far more than the 116,284 valid signatures required.

"Under the policies of Kate Brown, the Oregon Elections Division works hard to remove every possible signature from initiative petitions and for reasons that make no sense," Wolfe said in a press release. "Instead, they should be working to include as many signatures as possible, thus preserving citizen access to the ballot through the initiative system, as demanded by the Oregon Constitution."

Andrea Cantu-Schomus, Brown's spokeswoman, did not have any immediate comment on the lawsuit besides noting that many of the invalidated signatures were duplicates.

Wolfe is seeking to get his initiative -- which would give adult Oregonians the right to possess marijuana -- back on track. At this point, elections officials have halted any further work on verifying his signatures, saying he no longer has any chance of making the ballot.

Wolfe is also involved in a separate dispute with Brown's office, which issued a $65,000 fine against him for violating the state's ban on paying petitioners by the signature.

Wolfe is challenging the fine, saying that he sought to comply with the law and received an excessively harsh penalty. His attorneys complained that the secretary of state is violating the law by also launching a criminal investigation of Wolfe's actions at the same time they were proceeding with the civil case.

Wolfe's attorney in the petition lawsuit, Ross Day, charged that Brown's office has adopted a number of procedures for counting petition signatures that go well beyond the law.

"She claims she's protecting the initiative process. What she's doing is destroying it," said Day, who has worked on a number of petition drives for conservative causes.

In particular, the lawsuit charges that election officials should not have invalidated voter signatures on petition sheets where the petitioner made a clerical error -- such as correcting an inaccurate date.

Day also said that several thousand signatures were invalidated because voters were deemed inactive by county election officials for unspecified reasons, which he said has never happened before.

In addition, Day said that Brown's office is also now prohibiting petitioners from gaining new signatures from voters who have had their previous signatures thrown out for such things as clerical errors made by petitioners.

Day said the lawsuit is the first litigation involving many of the strict rules on paid petitioners that Brown has put in place since she became secretary of state in 2009. She has previously said that she is trying to root out fraud in the system, not deny access to the ballot by initiative campaigns.

--Jeff Mapes

