Massachusetts officials have denied a last-ditch attempt to keep an initiative to roll back the state’s marijuana legalization law from appearing on the November ballot.
The Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office determined earlier this month that organizers for the anti-cannabis initiative had turned in enough valid signatures to put the measure before voters, but marijuana reform advocate Kevin Gilnack then filed an objection with the State Ballot Law Commission claiming that various signatures were not genuine, obtained through fraudulent means or were not “signed substantially as registered.”
Others, the complaint said, belong to people who are not registered voters at the address they claimed or who subsequently requested to have their names removed. The filing also says that some petition forms contained extraneous marks or were not “exact copies” of the form provided by the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office, “in that they differ from the original in paper size, color, text, or format, or otherwise fail to conform to the requirements” of the law.
After holding a hearing on the dispute last week that included testimony from a forensic document examiner and handwriting expert who appeared on behalf of the challenger, the commission on Tuesday rejected the objection.
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