Whether Missouri voters will get a chance to legalize recreational marijuana in November is still in question.
The latest incomplete tabulations from Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s office, obtained under a Sunshine Law request, show the Legal Missouri 2022 initiative is short of the necessary signatures in four of the six Congressional districts necessary to make the ballot.
And those same tabulations confirm what backers of a ranked-choice voting initiative called Better Elections said in June — their proposal will not be on the November ballot.
The biggest obstacles for the initiative campaigns was the COVID-19 pandemic that made signature gathering difficult and a large number of signatures from unregistered people, said Sean Nicholson, campaign manager for Better Elections.
“It was a catastrophic failure on the part of Fieldworks,” Nicholson said of the Washington, D.C. firm paid more than $8 million total by the two campaigns to collect signatures. “We turned in signatures in the belief we had the stuff.”
Fieldworks has managed several successful signature-gathering efforts in Missouri, including a 2020 proposal on Medicaid expansion and a 2018 referendum on right to work.
Fieldworks is also disappointed in the result, the company said in a statement to The Independent.
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