Lawsuit Filed After Marijuana Legalization Goes Missing Off Florida Ballot

14797439_1465345753494035_1995612478_n-2By Alice Salles

The media has ridiculed presidential candidate Donald Trump for suggesting the election is “rigged.” While his comments should always be taken with a grain of salt, a case of a missing amendment in a Florida ballot is raising some eyebrows.

Anne Sallee, an Oakland Park resident and former city commissioner who lives in Broward, Florida, says she was shocked to notice her ballot had arrived in the mail without one of the most discussed amendments of the season. After spending a week trying to get the Broward elections office to listen, she decided to reach out to the Florida branch of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) for help.

Amendment 2 would legalize the use of medical marijuana in the Sunshine State, allowing “individuals with specific debilitating diseases or comparable debilitating conditions as determined by a licensed state physician” to have access to cannabis. But Amendment 2 was nowhere to be found on the ballot sent to Sallee.

According to NORML’s attorney, Norm Kent, the removal of the initiative from Sallee’s ballot may have been deliberate. And if enough ballots are sent without the initiative, voters won’t be able to check yes or no on the amendment. “[I]t’s like when you go to a restaurant,” Kent said, “something’s not on the menu, you don’t order it.”

In order to get to the bottom of this story, Kent is filing a lawsuit on behalf of NORML and Sallee, hoping to have the issue addressed before election day. “We need a judge to act expeditiously and promptly to effectuate a ruling that protects the rights of the voters in Broward County,” Kent told reporters.

After all, he said, if at least one ballot was sent without Amendment 2, there might be many others being sent out to Florida voters. “We have to find out whether there’s 100 ballots, 1,000 ballots or 10,000 ballots,” Kent added.

According to the Sun Sentinel, the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, Dr. Brenda Snipes, told the reporter that “[w]hen you’re dealing with this much paper and this many people, we may have made a mistake, but I haven’t heard a lot of people saying, ‘I don’t have [Amendment 2 in my ballot]’ either.’”

She added that the faulty ballots may have been printed as test samples for Oakland Park, claiming that after a local candidate dropped out, Snipes’ office re-coded the Oakland Park ballot, creating a new test ballot. Only seven of these ballots were allegedly produced, Snipes told reporters, but the office didn’t catch on to the error until later.

According to Kent, the lawsuit might force Snipes “to go before a judge and document every single ballot she has printed.”

Though the lawsuit was just filed, Kent is urging all local voters using the mail-in-ballot system to check whether Amendment 2 is missing.

This article (Lawsuit Filed After Marijuana Legalization Goes Missing Off Florida Ballot) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Alice Salles and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.


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8 Comments on "Lawsuit Filed After Marijuana Legalization Goes Missing Off Florida Ballot"

  1. Removing control of cannabis from Americans is the goal of the system that uses the illegality of cannabis to distract from the massive cocaine smuggling via Florida into the US. The book by former OSS general Russell S. Bowen, “The Immaculate Deception: Bush Crime Family Exposed”, 1990, contains answers.

  2. Well, that’s one way to get the results you want…..and it sucks!

  3. What isn’t explained here is why this Snipes woman didn’t feel it necessary to respond to the complainant about the missing amendment when she complained about it. I feel there may be a level of disingenuousness in Snipes’ explanation.

  4. You’d think this would be a non-issue what with all the seasoned citizens living in that state. Perfect weather for growing the perfect plant. Well, what you have in abundence in Florida like weather we have more than made up with the legal cannabis available state wide in Washington state most everywhere. The sky hasn’t fallen and the state hasn’t gone crazy OR to the druggies. In fact, about the only time you hear about cannabis on the news is when one of the stores, which are a cash only business due to BS federal banking laws where the straight laced always crime free banks (ya right) won’t do business with the cannabis businesses, get’s robbed. But now that we’re going on 4 years of legal cannabis even that is a rarity as there’s usually plenty of muscle (some armed) providing security keeping the robbers, for the most part, at bay. Anyway legal cannabis is the way to go and if it’s not legal where you are – it should be. And the proof is all the states that have already legalized without any negative effects for the most part so many seemed worried about. I’m telling you, the sooner your state legalizes cannabis, the sooner cannabis becomes a non-issue except for the tax money it will be bringing in helping already tight local and state govt budgets…

  5. Suggested reads. All statements backed up with footnotes.
    The Committee of 300 – John D. Coleman. hint: the Royals have owned the drug routes for hundreds of years and is a source of income for them.
    Barry and the Boys – Dennis Hopsicker. hint: makes Eric ‘fast and furious’ Holder look like a chump change thug. Bush senior era. From the Bay of Pigs to Mena, Arkansas.
    Trading tax payer funded guns for drugs, of course, so no expenses, just pure income. The only folks that lose are the tax payers. Poor Barry…RIP.

    BTW: Move to Colorado and imbibe for the health of it.

  6. It’s a very simple question, Who owns your body, you or the government ?? Should you be able to decide what to put in your own body, or do you believe the government has the right to decide for you. Government, the left wants to control what you think, the right wants control what you do. Freedom, taking control of yourself, and living with the consequences. If I am not endangering your life, liberty, or property, leave me alone.

  7. They wouldn’t be doing this is they didn’t know that they were going to lose this one. If California legalizes, there’s no stopping it. If Massachusetts legalizes, the race will be on the next time the economy takes another dive, since the FED won’t be bailing the states out.

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