Oklahoma marijuana activists have almost certainly failed to win November ballot access for an initiative that would have legalized recreational and medical marijuana.

Activists tell U.S. News the last-minute ballot push, spearheaded by Democratic state senator and U.S. Senate candidate Connie Johnson, was hampered by confusion and a lack of funding.

The all-volunteer effort was a long shot from the beginning. Petitioning started July 7, with more than 155,000 signatures due in less than two months for this year’s election.

Arlene Barnum, president of the Oklahoma Coalition Against Prohibition, says her group collected about 1,000 signatures before giving up earlier this month.

“They had the heart but there just was not the funds,” says Barum, whose group has organizers in each of the state’s 77 counties. “It just ran people down ragged.”

Barnum says supporters didn’t originally know the 90-day time frame for petitioning was shorter if they wanted the initiative on the November ballot.

Johnson, who on Tuesday won the Democratic Party’s runoff election for U.S. Senate, says the cutoff for this year’s ballot is Sept. 5 and that though “anything could happen, realistically I think we are looking at October” for initiative signature submission.

If enough signatures are submitted at the end of the 90-day window in October the question will go on the next statewide ballot, or the governor could call a special election.

Johnson says she has no idea how many signatures have been collected so far.

Johnson’s U.S. Senate campaign is standing in as the “point entity” for the effort in lieu of a dedicated campaign organization. The legalization push only recently inherited a website and a web of businesses hosting petitions from a medical marijuana initiative that failed to gather enough signatures.

Though it’s still possible to get the initiative on a future ballot, Barnum says members of her coalition are no longer collecting signatures because they would prefer to reword the proposal. They specifically want to eliminate a $100,000 cash-on-hand requirement for potential businessowners.

“We don’t want people to pick winners and loser out here,” she says. “We’re not going to disenfranchise people who have a good mind and an innovative spirit from starting a business. That’s the first thing to go.”

Barnum says this year’s effort sputtered in part because organizers lacked money for transportation, printing forms on nonstandard paper and mailing petitions.

The movement, Barnum adds, was divided by the medical marijuana campaign. Some activists sat out that petition drive to wait for the comprehensive legalization initiative, she says, causing hard feelings.

Norma Sapp, executive director of the Oklahoma chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also says confusion and lack of funds hurt the effort.

Sapp got her first petition form on Friday, and plans to start gathering signatures despite her suspicion the effort will fail.

“I don’t really hold hope,” she says. “At least with the medical one there was a little bit of money.”

Sapp says “there’s been fighting within the ranks” with some activists sitting on their hands and rewriting the initiative, others splitting off to organize under a group called the Oklahoma Reform Petition Initiative, and others working with Johnson’s campaign.

“Were talking about people here who have no organizing skills at all,” Sapp says of Oklahoma’s marijuana community. “Then something happened, the door opened, [but] these people are all new to it.”

Sapp says the current plan is to recruit 200 people to commit to gathering 780 signatures each, which would put the initiative over the threshold. She says 104 people have currently signed on.

David Slane, the criminal defense attorney who drafted the initiative with Johnson, says the game plan was always to have petition-gatherers hit major public gatherings in mid-September, including county fairs and the Sept. 11-21 state fair.

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But Slane concedes no initiative has made the ballot in Oklahoma without paid petition-gatherers. Slane recently received a $2 per signature quote for paid canvassers for a separate initiative he’s working on that would require tornado shelters in schools.

“I’m surprised that more of the Colorado folks who have been making money off the marijuana initiative there haven’t come down here ready to write checks,” he says. “If I was in Colorado and I was in the marijuana business I would be looking to franchise in Oklahoma … I would be getting a group of those people together almost like a PAC and go to Oklahoma and set up shop there too.”

The Oklahoma initiative would be the first to explicitly allow marijuana grown pursuant to state law to be exported to other jurisdictions that allow medical or recreational pot. The Department of Justice would likely need to give the go-ahead for that to happen.

Legalization may seem a tough sell in the socially conservative Bible Belt, but a survey conducted last year by SoonerPoll found 71 percent of Oklahoma residents favor medical marijuana and 57 percent support decriminalizing possession of 1 ounce of the drug. Respondents weren’t asked if they support legalization, but 82 percent said the decision should be left to the states.

“Regardless of the number of signatures what we’re going to demonstrate the interest of the people,” Johnson says. She says lessons from a failed effort would useful in the future.