Tomorrow is Election Day, and it promises to be the most important election in quite a while for Weedists, whether they be recreational users, medical marijuana patients, or their friends, family, and other supporters of personal freedom. Three states have initiatives to legalize marijuana completely on their ballots! Your vote will be critical to pass these and send a message to the rest of America that we are tired of being marginalized, criminalized, and institutionalized because of our choice of relaxant. After all, even during alcohol Prohibition, users were never targeted for prosecution. So, even if you think your state’s particular pro-legalization proposition isn’t “perfect”… please vote for it anyway!

Arkansas and Massachusetts are also voting on whether to allow legal medical marijuana in those states (vote YES), and Montana is voting on whether to reverse it (vote NO).

The biggest prize is President, but before we tackle that, you should know the saying “All politics is local”, and take advantage of ASA’s fantastic voter guide, which rates statewide and local candidates for their support of medical marijuana in every state. You have the power to influence the outcome of many senate and congressional races, but only if you vote!

Election Guide To Presidential Candidates

Most Americans tend to think there are only two choices here. But as people who have opened our own minds to other possibilities, we can see that there’s more to choose from than just the two major parties, both of whose candidates have made it clear that they don’t care about us (at best) or are willing to jail us (at worst). Significantly, neither Obama’s nor Romney’s website mentions marijuana (medical or otherwise), or even the War On Drugs, which keeps hundreds of thousands of Americans behind bars at a tremendous financial and human cost to our country.

Democrat Barack Obama, of course, is known in the cannabis community for his promises to consider legalization and back off DEA raids on state-legal medical marijuana facilities, only to end up doing far more damage in raids than even George W. Bush. Even worse, he’s promised us more of the same in his second term.

Mitt Romney, the Republican contender, makes no bones about hating marijuana and its users, having famously treated a dying MMJ patient like trash on video.

So why try to decide which is actually the lesser of the two evils… when they’re both pretty evil from our perspective? Instead, think outside the box and consider voting for someone who actually represents your interests. At least one respected political observer thinks that marijuana could well be the deciding factor in this race.

Back in the early 90s, gun rights supporters staged a major revolt against the “assault weapons” ban and voted incumbents out of Congress left and right. People stopped taking gun owners for granted in politics, and out of that grew the “Right-to-Carry” movement, which had been almost unthinkable before then… just like legalized marijuana seems today to many people. Check out this state-by-state map to see how well that strategy worked. And if a third-party candidate gets a decent amount of the vote, it will also help people see the power and importance of third parties and voting your conscience, not simply your convenience. A vote for someone you believe in is not wasted!

Gary Johnson was the governor of New Mexico for two terms, and is running for president on the Libertarian Party ticket. He is one of the few politicians to have publicly spoken out for drug law reform while in office. Johnson is one of the country’s most visible third-party candidates, and seems to have picked up many Ron Paul supporters as well as other endorsements. Johnson has many well-thought-out positions, but we consider marijuana very important around here, and so does he:

By managing marijuana like alcohol and tobacco – regulating, taxing and enforcing its lawful use – America will be better off. The billions saved on marijuana interdiction, along with the billions captured as legal revenue, can be redirected against the individuals committing real crimes against society.

Roseanne Barr (yes, the comedian… get over it) is running for president as the official candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party, which has been around since I took my first puff of grass in 1967. As befits someone who’s a medical marijuana patient herself, Barr’s platform page leads off with this:

The legalization of marijuana is the way to end all Drug Wars and stop the monopoly of the subsidized prison systems. Our government and corporations are getting paid every time someone goes to prison for non-violent crimes due to marijuana arrests. Drug laws need to be rewritten to make them sane and people based. We need to end the prohibition on marijuana and legalize it.

Jill Stein is running for president on the Green Party ticket. While marijuana is not specifically mentioned on her platform page, it does say (way at the end) that we should “end the ineffective and costly War on Drugs and begin to treat drug use as a public health problem, not a criminal problem.” She’s also been quoted as saying:

We consider marijuana a substance which is dangerous because it is illegal, but it is, in fact, not dangerous; it is far less a health concern than perfectly legal substances such as tobacco and alcohol.

In the course of researching this article, I found three more candidates for president who frankly, I had never heard of before, but they all support our cause, so you should know about them.

Rocky Anderson, who was twice elected mayor of Salt Lake City, said on his platform page: “I have opposed the so-called “war on drugs” for many years…One of the first things I did as Mayor of Salt Lake City was to end the DARE program — a major scam pulled on the people of the U.S.”

Matt Snyder is running as a Christian who doesn’t like drugs, and he’s for legalization: “It is absolutely foolish to think that we will ever eliminate pot smoking from our society. It is almost as ridiculous as criminalizing poverty.”

Will Christensen is also running as a conservative Christian. His platform page says: “Drugs, alcohol, & tobacco are state issues. The federal war on drugs will be terminated.”

For more information, you can check out this site’s roundup of some candidates’ quotations and interviews about marijuana. NORML also has a voter guide here.