There Was No Rule Breaking in the Campaign for Legal Pot, State Investigators Find

Portland Mercury:

After recreational marijuana's easy victory last year, it was easy to forget just how close and acrimonious the race for Measure 91 seemed at times. It wasn't just sharp rhetoric flying between supporters and opposition, either. It was elections complaints. Several of them. Written by a state prosecutor, four Oregon lawmakers, and legal weed crusaders alike. And as it turns out, none of them had much merit. No one named in any complaints over Measure 91 broke elections law last year, according to months-long investigations by the Oregon Secretary of State's Office. In three letters sent out today (here, here, and here [PDFs]), investigators say there's no evidence that a series of drug-prevention forums were sly, illegal attempts to campaign against Measure 91. And investigators found a crowd-funding donations to pot crusader—and head of the new Portland chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)—Russ Belville should have been reported as political contributions. A quick rundown: •Investigators found Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis didn't violate campaign law in his role as organizer for a planned 13-stop "Oregon Marijuana Education Tour." The tour drew ire from state and federal officials, because it initially planned to use funds from the federal war on drugs, and it wanted to leverage the work of county health employees at nearly each stop. Legal weed advocates saw it as campaigning on the public dime, explicitly against the law. Once those concerns came to light, the tour was scaled dramatically back, with ties to public workers severed and plans for federal money abandoned. That didn't stop four state lawmakers, Sen. Chip Shields, Sen. Floyd Prozanski, Rep. Paul Holvey, and Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer from filing a complaint out of concern county employees were being forced to campaign. The Secretary of State's Office found that wasn't the case: While the Tour was originally intended to include widespread public employee participation, there was very little public employee participation in the actual execution of the Tour. This office reviewed a video of one of the tour stops (Roseburg) and while the issue of marijuana was discussed, this is not unreasonable in the context of programming about substance abuse and drug abuse prevention. The measure was not discussed, and no one advocated a vote for or against Measure 91. •Marquis and another tour organizer, Steve Leriche, also were named in a complaint by Beaverton pot advocate Jennifer Alexander, who claimed their work setting up the tour amounted to "political advocacy," and that they were required to file as a political committee. Marquis and Leriche countered that the tour was merely educational. The Secretary of State agreed. "Upon a review of the complaint, the statutes, and the evidence available, we have concluded that the Tour was not a political committee," wrote Compliance Specialist Jennifer Hertel. "It did not receive a contribution for the specific purpose of opposing Measure 91." •Lastly, investigators found no merit in a complaint from Marquis, who says Belville broke the law when he set up an account on gofundme.com. The purpose of the crowdfunding campaign, Bellville wrote, was to "fight the use of public funds to defeat marijuana legalization in Oregon." It was explicitly critical of Marquis, but focused more on paying for public records requests than anything else. "Upon a review of the complaint, the statutes, and the evidence available, we have concluded that Mr. Bellville has not received a contribution for the specific purpose of supporting Measure 91," Hertel wrote in a letter to Marquis. [ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

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