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Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Supporters Offer Incentives For Signature-Gatherers

A volunteer with Oklahomans for Health hands a passerby a petition to sign at the group’s tent at Northwest Expressway and Meridian Avenue in Oklahoma City. The group is collecting signature for a ballot initiative that would legalize marijuana.
Brent Fuchs
/
The Journal Record
A volunteer with Oklahomans for Health hands a passerby a petition to sign at the group’s tent at Northwest Expressway and Meridian Avenue in Oklahoma City. The group is collecting signature for a ballot initiative that would legalize marijuana.";

The group collecting signatures for a medical marijuana ballot question is roughly two-thirds of the way to its goal of 80,000 signatures by August 11.

Oklahomans for Health, led by former state Rep. and 2014 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Joe Dorman, is now offering its volunteers cash to collect valid names:

The group is now advertising an incentive for its circulators – $1 for every person who signs both petitions, as long as it’s a registered Oklahoma voter and as long as the measure reaches the ballot. “We created an incentive program because of donations that are coming in,” said Dorman. “Rather than keep them back for the campaign and hope we get the number with the buffer of what we need, we’d rather take the money right now and use that to create an incentive to get more signatures in.”

Rose State College professor James Davenport told Denwalt it’s common for petition drives to pay by the signature. Some hire professional squads of collectors.

“Compensating them wouldn’t be out of the realm of normalcy for this kind of thing,” said Davenport, a professor at Rose State College. “If they’re getting close to the deadline of trying to get (signatures) in and they’re not confident that they have enough without making a push, that would be something you could imagine them doing.” Dorman said that he called professional circulators to find out how much they would charge to come to Oklahoma so late in the year. It would be out of reach. “They said because of the lateness of the season, and because every state is going through this right now, there wouldn’t be enough time or it would not be cost-effective for us to hire professionals to come in and do this,” he said.

Dorman says he has almost 1,000 people across the state who want to collect signatures. If the measure reaches the ballot and if Oklahomans vote for it, medical marijuana could be a reality in the state before the end of the year.

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