Show-Me Cannabis Regulation
Show-Me Cannabis Regulation is pleased to announce that we have secured funding that will allow us to begin paying $1 for every valid signature gathered on or after March 10 and turned into the campaign. Our funders are willing to give thousands more to help us get this measure on the November ballot, but only if we prove that we can gather at least 10,000 signatures by the end of next week, so it is imperative that each one of us gathers and turns in as many signatures as possible by March 19. Even just gathering 20 or 30 signatures from your friends and family will help us–and it will put an extra $20 or $30 in your pocket!
We intend to continue paying for signatures until we have gathered all that we need, but we will need grassroots support to make that happen, so please help us make the ballot by donating $10 or more to the campaign.
If you have gone through Show-Me Cannabis Regulation’s petitioner training, you are eligible to gather signatures for pay, but you will need to fill out a new waiver and Secretary of State registration form, which will indicate that you are being paid for your services. If you wish to continue donating your time to the cause, you will not need to fill out anything new, and your status as a volunteer will remain unchanged. If you are financially secure and have the time to spare, we certainly encourage you to continue collecting signatures as a volunteer; you can just consider every signature you collect to be a dollar donation to the campaign!
We can only afford to pay for signatures from our six priority congressional districts, which are districts 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 9, and you can see where those districts are located on this map. Signatures must also be valid for us to pay for them, so they need to be legible with no whiteout or scribbles that black out mistakes on the page (mistakes should be crossed out with a single line and initialed by the signer), and from a registered Missouri voter in one of the six congressional districts. If you are not certain if someone is registered to vote, you can check on the Secretary of State’s website here or on our validation system here. (Our validation system requires less information, but at the moment, it uses a voter file from December 2011, so anyone registered since then won’t show up. However, we have ordered a new file and will be switching it out shortly.)
Signatures will need to be validated before we can pay for them, so pay periods will be every two weeks, with the first being Friday, March 30. This should go without saying, but any attempt to tamper with petition forms (for instance, by changing the date to fall after the campaign began paying for signatures) will invalidate the signatures and result in automatic dismissal from the campaign. It is also a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by a up to a year in prison and/or a $10,000 fine.
If you are looking for good events to gather signatures, we are now posting signature gathering opportunities on our calendar, and the SMCR Canvasser Facebook page is a lively source of event postings, tips on canvassing, and often inspiring (but occasionally frustrating) stories from the field.
There are over 1,200 of us, and we only need to gather about 130,000 more valid signatures, which means that if on average, each person can gathers 110 valid signatures in our priority districts, we will meet our goal. But the time to act is now. We have built an impressively large volunteer campaign, but if we do not act immediately, the funding will disappear, taking our best chance to make the ballot along with it. The field of battle is prepared, and the troops assembled and equipped. When the bugle blows, will you march forward with us to win a battle for freedom, or retreat and allow the prohibitionists to win by default? The choice is yours.
