HEARING ON MISSING MARIJUANA PETITION SIGNATURES PLANNED FOR TODAY

Many Las Vegans spent Thursday snickering over the saga of a misplaced
box of signatures designed to help qualify a ballot petition seeking
to legalize possession of marijuana.

But the litany of "were they high?" or "dude, what a bummer" jokes
heard on radio, in Starbucks and over water coolers is no laughing
matter to petition organizer Billy Rogers, who Wednesday filed an
emergency request for a hearing in District Court.

Judge Ken Cory will hear the case this afternoon.

"Ultimately, what we're saying is that all of these petitions were
properly notarized and signed before June 15," Rogers said, referring
to last week's deadline to submit petitions. "A remedy exists to count
them."

Rogers said it took him two hours to count the signatures he
discovered on a chair in his office Saturday, four days after the
deadline to turn in the signatures.

"They can put two people on it and double-check and still get done in
time," Rogers said.

Clark County election officials were given a raw count of signatures
on the initiative Tuesday from the secretary of state's office.

The local officials now must determine the number of valid signatures
on the petition by randomly surveying 5 percent of the signatures turned in.

Without the 6,000 signatures, election officials believe Rogers'
Committee to Regulate and Control Marijuana will not have enough of a
cushion to meet the roughly 51,000 signatures required statewide to
qualify a petition for the ballot.

Most initiative petitions have a 30 percent error rate, meaning three
out of every 10 signatures on a petition belongs to someone who isn't
qualified to sign.

Rogers thought he was turning in 41,000 signatures in Clark County to
meet the county's requirement of 31,360 signatures. But without the
misplaced box, he actually turned in 35,000.

On Wednesday, Rogers said he has no idea how the box of signatures
landed in his office sometime late Friday or early Saturday morning.

"The petitions were stored in my office, which was under lock," said
Rogers, president of the Southwest Group. "We did a hard count about
six days before the turn-in day. That was to figure out where we were
and where we needed to go."

On June 14, he said all of the boxes from the marijuana initiative and
three others his firm was handling were taken to a counting room and
bundled in boxes for delivery to the county election department the
next day.

"We thought we turned in 969 booklets with almost 41,000 signatures,"
Rogers said. "That's what we thought until Saturday afternoon when I
walked in my office and found a box sitting on a chair that people had
been sitting in the day before.

"I don't know how those signatures came to be in my office and I don't
know who put them here because nobody in my office that I have talked
to can tell me how they wound up here," Rogers added. "The bottom line
is nobody has come to me and said 'Billy I made a horrible mistake.'
"

Rogers said the discovery of legitimate signatures, which have been
stored at attorney Ross Goodman's office for safekeeping since they
were found, is akin to the discovery of a ballot box after the polls
close on election day.

"If it's prior to the canvass, you do something about it," Rogers
said. "You count the votes. These are in fact votes. These are people
who are voting to put this on the ballot so all Nevadans have a choice."

The petition seeks to legalize possession of 1 ounce of marijuana,
sold by the state.

The petition also would increase penalties for driving under the
influence and for selling or providing drugs to a minor.