Nebraska Will Count Medical Cannabis Votes Despite Last-Minute Legal Challenge

A district court judge in Nebraska ruled that despite a last-minute legal challenge to the state’s medical cannabis legalization bid this year, officials will count votes for and against the state’s cannabis ballot initiatives and publish the results, the Nebraska Examiner reports. Whether the results will actually mean something, however, still hinges on the outcome of the ongoing legal challenge.

Lancaster County District Judge Susan Strong noted that early voting has already commenced in the state and that the “status quo” is to count votes on Election Day.

Nebraska voters are considering two medical cannabis ballot initiatives this year — advocates broke the issue into two initiatives after a medical cannabis legalization effort in 2020 was shut down by the state Supreme Court for violating requirements that ballot initiatives focus on a single issue. Following the 2020 court ruling, advocates then failed in 2022 to collect enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. But if both initiatives are approved this year by voters, they would together legalize medical cannabis access and establish a regulated marketplace for medical cannabis products.

Plaintiffs in the case argue that the campaign relied on an illegal signature-gathering process, and have called for the counting of votes to be blocked. Two witnesses said in court last week that they broke the law when collecting signatures for the campaign, and might have worked with notaries who also broke the law in validating the signatures, the report said.

Attorney Daniel Gutman, who represents the campaign behind the ballot initiatives, said “it would be a travesty of democracy to halt an election” off of the testimony of just two campaign workers, “and that’s essentially what the request is.”