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Marijuana Measure Falls Short For Fall Ballot
Election - Improperly signed and dated petitions disqualify several thousand signatures
OregonLive.com | 08/08/06

Talk about a buzz kill.

Although they paid petition circulators $94,000, organizers of an effort to make marijuana crimes Portland's lowest law enforcement priority failed to gather enough signatures for the November ballot.

The city auditor's office ruled that the group calling itself Citizens for a Safer Portland turned in 31,623 John and Jane Hancocks -- more than the 26,691 they needed to qualify. But the city elections officer found that several hundred sheets, containing 4,449 signatures, were not properly dated and signed.

In the end, the city gave the group credit for just 27,174 signatures. So initiative organizers weren't surprised when a random sample showed too many of those were invalid, in most cases because the signers weren't registered voters.

Petition gatherers typically try to compile thousands more signatures than they need to weed out duplicates and people who aren't registered. Chris Iverson, one of the effort's organizers, says his campaign team collected more than 40,000 signatures. They weeded out some 3,000 duplicates and another 3,000 from people who signed but did not live in Portland.

The bigger problem was with all those discarded circulation sheets.

"The state rule says that if the signature on the circulation sheet doesn't match the signature in the voter registration database perfectly, they throw it out," he said. "A lot of the people gathering for us used shorthand or their initials, because they were doing so many of these sheets. It was obvious it was the same person -- we had W-4s and all kinds of legal documents to prove it -- but because the law is so exacting, we lost those signatures."

Iverson, who also ran for City Council earlier this year, says the law is unfair toward grassroots campaigns, which rely more on volunteers and newcomers to the petition business. But he says he now knows how to run a successful petition campaign.

"The next time, I won't make any mistakes," he said. "The way I see it, we got two-thirds of the way there. We're probably going to try again."

Supporters of the marijuana initiative say police officers should spend their time fighting serious and violent crimes, not marijuana-related ones. Ballot measure organizers raised $126,259 -- almost all of it from the Washington D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project.

Portland Police Bureau leaders have noted that marijuana already ranks low on their priority list.

Anna Griffin: 503-294-5988; annagriffin@news.oregonian.com