The Nebraska Supreme Court has upheld two voter-approved medical marijuana initiatives, rejecting a legal challenge that sought to invalidate the measures over alleged problems involving petition circulators and notaries.
In a ruling filed September 4, the state’s highest court affirmed a Lancaster County District Court decision that found the petitions contained enough valid signatures to qualify for the November 2024 ballot. Nebraska voters subsequently approved both measures.
One initiative legalized marijuana for medical purposes, while the other established the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission to regulate its manufacture and distribution.
John Kuehn and Nebraska Secretary of State Robert Evnen challenged the petitions, arguing that additional signatures should have been invalidated because of circulator fraud and improper notarizations. They argued, in part, that when a notary was shown to have improperly notarized one or more petition pages, signatures on other pages handled by that notary should also lose their presumption of validity.
The Supreme Court rejected that argument, finding that the role of a notary differs substantially from that of a petition circulator. The court said an improper notarization on one or more pages does not automatically justify invalidating signatures on every page handled by the same notary.
The justices also upheld the lower court’s decision not to draw adverse inferences from several campaign workers invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The Supreme Court said that even assuming such an inference was legally permissible, the district court had discretion not to make one under the circumstances.
Nebraska required at least 86,499 valid signatures for each initiative. The Secretary of State initially verified 89,962 signatures for the legalization petition and 89,856 for the regulatory petition.
After reviewing allegations of circulator fraud and improper notarization, the district court ultimately determined that the legalization petition still contained 89,251 valid signatures and the regulatory petition contained 89,030, leaving both comfortably above the required threshold.
The Supreme Court found no error in those determinations or in the lower court’s findings regarding specific campaign workers and allegations of broader rule-breaking by notaries.
“We therefore affirm the district court’s order,” the court concluded.
Justice John Cassel wrote separately to emphasize that widespread or pervasive notarial failures could justify shifting the burden to initiative sponsors to prove affected signatures were valid. In this case, however, he said the evidence did not rise to that level. Justice Jonathan Papik Freudenberg joined that concurrence.
The ruling leaves intact the two medical marijuana measures approved by Nebraska voters in 2024 and resolves the central challenge to whether they had legally qualified for the ballot.
