Marijuana Moment: Idaho Medical Marijuana Ballot Campaign Hits Snags Over Signatures

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“Due to these complaints and a demonstrated inability to verify residency of certain circulators, we have requested all county clerks and their staff review and log circulator information.”

By Kyle Pfannenstiel, Idaho Capital Sun

Minutes after a local elections office in rural south central Idaho closed last month, a contractor for the group backing a proposed ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana caught the attention of a county staffer who was trying to leave work.

The contractor was trying to deliver signatures of registered voters—in hopes of helping the initiative become the first marijuana legalization initiative to qualify for the ballot in Idaho, which is one of few states where marijuana remains entirely illegal.

But it was too late.

The employee for the Minidoka County Clerk’s Office didn’t take the roughly 4,000 signatures, which were due by close of business that day: Friday, May 1. But another employee did.

Days later, the local elected official who runs that office, Minidoka County Clerk Tonya Page, decided to not count them.

The encounter was detailed in a lawsuit that unsuccessfully tried to get a judge to require the county to count the signatures. The group behind the medical marijuana ballot initiative turned in many of its 150,000 signatures gathered by paid signature gatherers as the deadline neared.

Even without signatures from Minidoka, the medical marijuana organizers are hopeful—but not sure—that their proposal will end up on November ballots.

“We got a very significant number of signatures over the required amount. And based on those numbers, we do feel confident,” Amanda Watson, a Boise-based spokesperson for the Natural Medicine Alliance of Idaho, said in an interview last week.

In Idaho, qualifying initiatives for the ballot is hard.

In Idaho, the ballot initiative is a form of direct democracy where the voters of Idaho—not the Legislature—decide whether to pass a new law.

Two separate groups are hoping to qualify initiatives for the ballot this November: One to legalize medical marijuana, and one to end Idaho’s strict abortion ban.

To qualify for the ballot in Idaho, initiatives must clear two hurdles: Organizers must collect valid signatures from 6 percent of registered voters across Idaho, as well as from 6 percent of voters from 18 of Idaho’s 35 legislative districts. Few initiative efforts have cleared that hurdle since the Legislature set the standard in 2013. The Legislature has attempted to raise that threshold significantly since then.

The group behind the medical marijuana initiative, which spent $2 million on paid signature gatherers, has announced it gathered 150,000 signatures. That would appear to be more than enough to meet the statewide threshold.

But unlike the initiative to end Idaho’s abortion ban, the medical marijuana group hasn’t said if it has cleared the requirements to gather enough signatures in just over half of Idaho’s legislative districts.

So far, the medical marijuana initiative hasn’t yet met the legal requirements to qualify for the ballot, Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane said in an interview.

On the other hand, an initiative to end Idaho’s strict abortion ban and establish reproductive rights seems likely to “have met the threshold,” McGrane said.

In about two weeks, it’ll become clear which ballot initiatives Idaho voters will get the chance to decide on in November. Counties will finish their signature verifications on Tuesday. Then groups behind initiatives can turn in their signatures to the Idaho Secretary of State’s Office, which will do the final tally.

The abortion initiative organizers, which include 1,100 volunteers, turned in signatures throughout the months they gathered them. For them, the final day to turn in signatures was “pretty quiet,” said Melanie Folwell, who leads the group behind the abortion ballot initiative.

“We knew we qualified,” she said.

Many signatures gathered for petitions are disqualified later

Part of why some ballot initiative organizers turn in signatures early is to get feedback on how their efforts are going. Usually, McGrane said around half of signatures are disqualified for several reasons, such as the person not being a registered voter at the time they signed a petition, or not being registered to vote at that address.

The medical marijuana organizers hired private firms that use their own software to verify petition signatures, Watson said. And initiative organizers had planned to submit signatures around the deadline, she said.

“We just noted that that was the deadline, and so that’s kind of what we are working toward,” Watson said.

Watson said she feels confident that the medical marijuana initiative will qualify for the ballot. But she said she doesn’t know for sure.

“We’re not in the business of…guessing what the counties are going to come back with,” Watson said when asked if the initiative qualified enough legislative districts.

In Minidoka, a judge found the signatures were turned in late

At first, an attorney for the PAC behind the medical marijuana initiative asked the Minidoka County clerk to reconsider her decision to not count the signatures.

In a May 18 letter, the attorney, Jeremy Chou, told Page, the county clerk, that the PAC’s contractor says she showed up to the Minidoka County Clerk’s Office a few minutes before the office was set to close.

The next day, Page sent Chou—an influential Idaho lobbyist and attorney who represented the Legislature in a lawsuit this year—security footage from the building.

“Contrary to the representations contained in your letter, the County’s security camera footage clearly shows (the Natural Medicine Alliance of Idaho’s) representatives arriving in the Minidoka County parking lot at approximately 5:05 p.m. on May 1, 2026—after the statutory filing deadline and after the close of business,” Page wrote in a letter on May 19, when Idaho’s primary elections took place.

Two weeks later, the Natural Medicine Alliance of Idaho LLC and PAC sued to try to get a court to require the county to validate the signatures.

In the county’s reply, prosecuting attorneys cited the group’s new timeline, which was the same as the county clerk’s: The consultant arrived at 5:05 p.m.

But an Idaho judge ruled the signatures were turned in too late to count, rejecting the Natural Medicine Alliance’s claims that the office was still open after its business hours.

The judge, W. Reed Cotten, laid out a chain of events in his ruling.

After the employee unlocked and opened the front door of the Minidoka County Clerk’s Office, they told the contractor that the office was closed. Then they closed the door.

Another employee, who was leaving for the day, opened the door and talked with the contractor, who insisted on dropping off the signatures.

“Fearing escalating a potentially contentious situation and seeking to resolve the matter as quickly as possible, this employee agreed to take the petitions, but informed the contractor that the petitions will still be late,” the judge wrote in his June 18 ruling.

In an interview last week, the Minidoka County clerk said that signatures for ballot initiatives tend to trickle in—not come through in a large batch.

“We’ve never had this issue before,” Page said.

Idaho’s top election official urged medical marijuana group to turn in signatures early

About a month before signatures were due, the Idaho secretary of state also urged the medical marijuana organizers to turn in their signatures early. McGrane said he’d seen news reports that said organizers “collected tens of thousands of signatures.”

By the end of March, only about 10,200 had been turned in, and less than half of those were verified, McGrane wrote in a letter to the Natural Medicine Alliance’s attorney.

“While the submission deadline is May 1st, delivering a large volume on that final day would create significant time constraints and administrative burden for Idaho’s county clerks,” he wrote. He noted that the final two-month window in which county clerks can verify signatures overlaps with Idaho’s primary election, which county clerks also manage.

McGrane wrote that he recognized that the state’s laws don’t require organizers to turn in signatures early, but he encouraged it—for easing the demand on election officials, and for initiative organizers themselves. “This will also give you a better idea of the progress of your initiative efforts,” McGrane wrote.

Asked why organizers waited after Idaho’s top election official asked them to file the signatures early, Watson said they already had planned to submit them around the submission deadline. The group says it collected signatures in all 44 counties.

“We’re still within the law… And we’ve had a good working relationship with the Secretary of State’s Office. So it was communicated that we were likely just going to follow what we perceived to be the appropriate way to turn in,” Watson said.

In Boise, Ada County Clerk Trent Tripple said medical marijuana organizers dropped off nearly 6,000 pages of signatures on the due date.

“We’ve been working nonstop,” Tripple said in an interview.

Idaho Secretary of State’s Office says some signatures could be thrown out without more proof

Some signatures for the medical marijuana initiative could also be thrown out.

This month, Deputy Secretary of State Matthew Reiber in a letter told the Natural Medicine Alliance it needed to verify whether some signature gatherers lived in Idaho. If signature gatherers aren’t Idaho residents, and at least 18 years old, the signatures they gathered won’t count.

That’s another requirement in Idaho law, which the Legislature added in 1999. Only six states require ballot initiative signature gatherers to live in the state where they are collecting signatures, according to Ballotpedia.

The letter—which the Sun obtained through a records request—was following up on several complaints about the initiative that the Secretary of State’s Office received.

“Due to these complaints and a demonstrated inability to verify residency of certain circulators, we have requested all county clerks and their staff review and log circulator information,” Reiber wrote.

The Natural Medicine Alliance has until Tuesday to provide proof of residency for those petition gatherers, according to the letter.

Watson, said the group “will work with the Secretary of State’s office to collect any information requested.”

This story was first published by Idaho Capital Sun.

Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.

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