Bill Laitner

Detroit Free Press

A ballot drive to legalize marijuana in Michigan is sputtering.

The Bureau of Elections in Lansing announced today that the statewide petition campaign fell at least 106,000 signatures short to get on November ballots.

That word came less than a week after the MILegalize group turned in a truckload of petitions and its leaders claimed they had more than enough signatures.

On Thursday, the State Board of Canvassers is expected to approve the bureau's advice by voting to keep the group’s marijuana measure off fall ballots. But MILegalize, which backed a plan to tax and regulate marijuana much like alcohol, isn’t giving up.

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“This was expected — we will prevail,” said Jeff Hank, a Lansing lawyer who chaired the group.

“We expect the Board of Canvassers to continue to engage in poor government and to follow the staff recommendation (on Thursday), and we will file a lawsuit very shortly after that,” Hank said. The lawsuit would challenge the state's move to disallow more than 137,000 MILegalize signatures that weren't gathered within 180 days of last week's June 1 deadline.

Overall, it would challenge whether the "180-day window” cited by state election officials is a valid limit for petition campaigns, Hank said. That so-called window was not a part of state law until today, when Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill that codified what had been merely a 1986 policy of the State Board of Canvassers.

For decades, the 180-day policy was rarely questioned. But this year, several petition groups argued that it was unenforceable and unconstitutional. Hank and the leaders of other petition campaigns — notably, a group that pushed unsuccessfully for a ballot measure to ban petroleum “fracking” — have testified at hearings in Lansing, arguing that the 180-day limit should be overruled by the state Board of Canvassers. Others testified that 180 days was reasonable.

"This process was never meant to be easy — it's supposed to be a high bar," said John Pirich, a constitutional law expert who testified twice against extending the limit.

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With Snyder’s signature today, the momentum grew behind elected Republican officials, including state lawmakers who've said they want the rules to be tighter, not more lenient, for petition campaigns seeking to put citizens’ proposals on election ballots. In a news release, Snyder defended his signature on the bill that was almost universally criticized by Democrats.

"Establishing reasonable time limits on when signatures can be collected helps ensure the issues that make the ballot are the ones that matter most to Michiganders," Snyder said in the release.

Leaders of petition groups including MILegalize have said that the 180-day limit means that grassroots groups are largely shut out of the process of putting a citizens’ referendum question on election ballots — the means created by 18th-Century reformers for circumventing a legislative body when it refuses to act on an issue. The petition leaders said that 180 days is too short a time for them to succeed with unpaid volunteers.

“What this limit means is that only if you have a million bucks (to hire professional petition circulators) will you ever get anything on the ballot,” Hank said. Voters across the political spectrum should be concerned, he added.

“This isn’t just about marijuana. If people are upset about money and politics and special interests, this 180-day limit is guaranteed to give special interests even more power over our system and citizens less,” he said.

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The process of ordinary citizens circulating petitions to qualify ballot measures dates back hundreds of years in the U.S. and Europe. According to previous Free Press reports, a referendum question in 1976 allowed voters to pass Michigan’s bottle-and-can deposit law, after state lobby groups of the soft drink, beer and grocery industries blocked it for years. And, it let state voters pass a referendum question in 2008 by a 63% margin to allow medical marijuana in Michigan, another issue long ducked by state lawmakers. In 1998, Michigan voters rejected a physician-assisted suicide measure. And in 2000, they defeated a school voucher question sponsored by Dick DeVos, son of Amway cofounder and charter-school backer Richard DeVos Sr.

If the MILegalize proposal fails to make the ballot, it would spell the end of what was the best-funded and best-organized effort to put a cannabis question on state ballots this year.

Two other groups dropped their efforts last fall. A fourth, the low-key Midland-based Abrogate Prohibition, is seeking to amend the state constitution — an even higher bar that requires collecting 315,000 signatures by July 1, according to state election law.

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Contact Bill Laitner: 313-223-4485 or blaitner@freepress.com