LINCOLN — Secretary of State Bob Evnen has officially finalized Nebraska’s fall 2024 ballot with six ballot measures advancing to the Nov. 5 general election.

Evnen said county election officials faced upwards of 600,000 signatures to verify this summer across six different petitions, each garnering enough valid signatures by Friday’s final deadline.

“We have met that time frame because our counties put the pedal to the metal and did a great job confirming these signatures,” Evnen said at an afternoon news conference.

The certification also confirms candidates for various offices — U.S. president, members of Congress, Nebraska Legislature, State Board of Education, University of Nebraska Board of Regents, Public Service Commission, community college governing boards, natural resources districts, public power districts, educational service units and reclamation districts. 

It also confirms the list of judges and justices up for retention.

Medical cannabis signatures

An investigation continues, as announced Friday by Attorney General Mike Hilgers, into what he and Evnen said were “infirmities” or “irregularities” in the signature-gathering process for two ballot measures related to medical cannabis. 

Evnen declined to specify what irregularities might exist, and Hilgers did not outline them.

Hall County officials charged a Grand Island man, who was a paid circulator for those efforts, with a felony for allegedly falsifying at least 200 signatures across the two petitions. Evnen said his office will continue to cooperate with Hilgers.

Medical marijuana legalization and regulation are certified for Nebraska’s November ballot

Evnen said that even though the ballot is certified, the Nebraska Supreme Court could take up a challenge to the marijuana-related petitions, or any others. He’s said that happened in Nebraska history up to four days before an election, as well as after voters had weighed in, that invalidated ballot measures.

“The fact that we had a hard stop and certified the ballot today doesn’t mean that nothing further is going to happen with respect to the investigation of the signatures in the medical cannabis initiatives,” Evnen said.

Evnen also confirmed what the Nebraska Examiner reported earlier in the day from Hall County Election Commissioner Tracy Overstreet that any invalid signatures, including those from the man charged with a felony, were tossed.

“They were flagged as fraudulent and rejected and not counted toward those totals from the get-go,” Overstreet said Friday morning.

Evnen said there “may” be irregularities in other counties. But when asked by reporters whether he had heard from county election officials other than Overstreet, Evnen said he had not.

The medical cannabis petitions are also being targeted in a separate lawsuit from John Kuehn, a former state senator and former State Board of Health member. The case in Lancaster County District Court has not been scheduled.

Other legal challenges

Dueling abortion measures make ballot, Nebraska Supreme Court decides

Three other ballot measures also faced legal challenges but the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected them Friday morning. Those measures were on two separate constitutional amendments related to abortion and a partial repeal of a state-funded program to cover private K-12 school costs. Evnen said he doesn’t expect further signature-related challenges on those.

Evnen celebrated the court’s “speed and dispatch” in delivering decisions for cases filed before the court within just the past few weeks.

Multiple justices had questioned whether the court could take legal challenges sooner in the process, not just after Evnen had certified the measures for the ballot. Some of those deadlines are set by federal or state law, and others are constitutional in nature.

Nebraska Supreme Court lets voters decide fate of school choice law

The secretary said he is looking at whether there can be a way to ease up the timeline. Currently, signatures are due four months before an election and counties must verify the petitions within 40 days of receiving them. The ballot must be finalized 50 days before the election.

Evnen said he also intends to follow the advice from Chief Justice Mike Heavican and Justice Lindsey Miller-Lerman, the court’s two longest serving members, that once a secretary of state determines the legal sufficiency of a measure, it can’t be rescinded.

Hilgers, on Evnen’s behalf, said Evnen had changed his mind but would respect the court’s decision but might decertify the measure if the court tossed the lawsuit on a technicality.

“The opinions that the court handed down today are well reasoned and well articulated,” Evnen said.

2024 ballot measures

Evnen certified six ballot measures for the Nov. 5 general election ballot, which were assigned a measure number between 434 and 439 at random.

• Protect Women and Children — Prohibit abortions after the first trimester or pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, in the Nebraska Constitution. Future restrictions would be allowed. (Measure 434)
• Private Education Scholarship Partial Repeal (Legislative Bill 1402) — Repeal the $10 million scholarship program, enacted earlier this year, that the state treasurer oversees to distribute to students to attend K-12 private schools. (Measure 435)
• Paid Sick Leave — Enact a new state law that would require businesses with 20 or fewer employees to fund at least five paid sick days each year for full-time employees. Larger businesses would need to annually fund at least seven sick days per full-time employee. An hour of sick leave would be earned after every 30 hours worked. (Measure 436)
• Nebraska Medical Cannabis Regulation — Define cannabis; legalize possessing, manufacturing, distributing, delivering and dispensing cannabis for medical purposes; and create the Nebraska Medical Cannabis Commission to oversee the new state law. (Measure 437)
• Nebraska Medical Cannabis Patient Protection — Set an allowable amount of medical cannabis at five ounces; exempt patients and caregivers from using or assisting someone else in using the cannabis; and require a written recommendation from a health care practitioner prior to prescription. (Measure 438)
• Protect the Right to Abortion — Codify a right to abortion in the Nebraska Constitution until “fetal viability” as determined by a health care provider, with a later exception for the mother’s health. (Measure 439)

LINCOLN — Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers said Friday a statewide investigation continues into “several thousand signatures” collected on ballot initiative petitions, just hours before a key deadline to include them on the November ballot.

Hilgers, a Republican, also announced at least one Grand Island man who had been hired to collect signatures for a marijuana initiative has been criminally charged. Hilgers has opposed legalizing any form of cannabis, but said the timing of his announcement coincided with the conclusion of part of his investigation and not the signature certification deadline.

“We’ve seen these irregularities implicate several thousand signatures,” Hilgers told reporters Friday. “Our work is still ongoing, we will have more to say. Today is the deadline for the Secretary of State but it is not our deadline in order to complete our work.”

Signatures not counted ‘from the get-go’

Hilgers is a former state lawmaker and has also led a statewide campaign against delta-8, which contains THC, the compound in the cannabis plant most commonly associated with getting a person high.

Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen must decide Friday whether the petitions from Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana collected enough valid signatures to be included on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Evnen said Aug. 30 that the campaign had provisionally qualified with enough valid signatures. The campaign needs about 86,500 and had 89,000 signatures as of Aug. 30, as the validation process continued. He had not yet decided the petition’s fate as of midday Friday.

Hall County Election Commissioner Tracy Overstreet confirmed to the Nebraska Examiner that the numbers Evnen used at the time did not include the ones from the man who has been criminally charged.

She said they “were flagged as fraudulent and rejected and not counted toward those totals from the get-go.”

Petition verification continues 

Hilgers said “other irregularities” are being investigated but did not specify on which petition or how many on any petition being circulated, or in which counties.

There are currently six petitions vying for a spot on the Nov. 5 ballot, and Evnen has certified four of them. Three were successful Friday morning against legal challenges, and medical marijuana faces its own, including claims against valid signatures.

Should the petitions be placed on the ballot, and enough signatures knocked off in that time frame, Hilgers said, the outcome of his investigation might mean the new laws won’t take effect.

“The integrity of our elections transcends ideology. It transcends policy issues. It transcends party,” Hilgers said. “This is about making sure that Nebraskans have confidence in our election system.”

Petition pages are turned in to the Secretary of State’s Office four months before the general election they seek to be printed on. Local election officials then count and validate the signatures according to state law, not state officials.

Signatures are regularly tossed from the count if local officials determine they are not valid, including for any of the other petitions in circulation this cycle. Klein said officials must link any irregularities back to a specific person in order to pursue charges.

“Petition circulators and voters alike should know and understand that this office — and all election offices across Nebraska — take elections and signature verification very seriously,” Overstreet said in a statement. “We go through each petition line by line by line, signature by signature — just like we do for signatures on early voting ballot envelopes.”

‘Wouldn’t matter what the petition would be’ 

Hilgers said Nebraskans should be confident that election or law enforcement officials who identify any instance of fraud or wrongdoing will investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute. 

He said it is up to Evnen to determine the legal sufficiency of the ballot measures.

Asked whether every other petition circulating in Nebraska this cycle is being given the same scrutiny — those related to abortion, private K-12 school vouchers and paid sick leave — Hilgers said: “We have a process, and it applies to everyone equally and fairly.”

“I can absolutely tell you definitively, with 100% certainty, no matter what the petition was, if we had evidence of signature fraud, the same kind of evidence that we have in this case. Absolutely wouldn’t matter what the petition would be,” Hilgers said.

Hilgers said he and other local officials are on the lookout for fraud, but he is unaware of other irregularities that have at least been brought to his office. He cautioned “that doesn’t mean I’ve blessed the process of any other petitions.”

Marijuana signature case

Hilgers and Hall County Attorney Martin Klein announced that Michael K. Egbert, 66, had been charged with allegedly collecting at least 200 fraudulent signatures. Egbert allegedly did so across 38 signature pages spread between two medical marijuana-related petitions to respectively legalize and regulate the drug between Feb. 9 and June 30.

According to a probable cause affidavit filed Thursday, Egbert said in an Aug. 30 interview he had been working as a paid petition circulator and was paid by the hour, mostly in Hall County.  Egbert allegedly said at the time he submitted “well over 100 pages” of signatures.

“He had in fact written names down, gone out into a phone book and got names of individuals with addresses here in the Grand Island, Hall County area,” Klein told reporters.

The affidavit charged Egbert with making up wrong dates of birth and listing up to eight voters who had died on each petition. 

Hilgers said the count of alleged fraudulent signatures is “not a static, firm number.”

Egbert is charged with false swearing to a circulator’s affidavit on a ballot petition, a Class IV felony. The penalty ranges from probation to up to two years in prison, and up to a $10,000 fine.

The case has been assigned to Judge Arthur S Wetzel. Egbert will be arraigned Oct. 2 in Hall County.

Egbert’s attorney, Robert Alexander, who sat in on an interview with Egbert and local officials on Sept. 10, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At that interview, according to the affidavit, Egbert said he would leave his petitions unattended and did not sign his circulator’s calculator’s oath in the presence of a notary.

Crista Eggers, statewide campaign manager for Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana, said in a statement that all circulators are given “extensive training.” She thanked Klein and Hilgers for looking into any irregularities and working to protect the integrity of the public initiative process.

“Circulators are held to an extremely high standard and are required to strictly follow all legal requirements for collecting signatures,” Eggers said in a statement. “Any circulators caught violating the law should be held accountable for their actions.”

egbert-probable-cause-affidavit

A pint-sized 27-year-old sicko who posed as a teenager and sexually assaulted high school students sat stonefaced in a Nebraska courtroom when he learned he would spend the rest of his life behind bars for his sex crimes.

For 54 days in 2023, Zachary Scheich “blended in with other students” when he pretended to be 17-year-old “Zak Hess” and attended classes at Southeast High School in Lincoln, Neb. where he committed the vile predatory attacks.

Scheich was sentenced on Wednesday to 85 to 120 years in prison for the felonies he faced including two counts of child enticement with electronic communication device, two counts of first-degree sexual assault/forcible touching, and an attempt of class two felony.

He originally faced nine felony charges, but were reduced as part of a plea deal in July.

The pedophile is eligible for parole in 41 years. Judge Darla Ideus gave Scheich credit for 419 days served.

“They knew not to speak with an adult male on social media. They knew not to meet an adult male by themselves, they knew how to defend themselves against that kind of danger,” Ideus said during the sentencing, KOLN reported.

“They did not know how to protect themselves against you. Because again, they thought you were their peer. Their friend. And because you gained their trust.”

Scheich devised a plan to enroll in the high school where he created a fraudulent birth certificate, immunization records and an “elaborate backstory,” according to the outlet.

He sought the help of his accomplice, 23-year-old Angela Navarro, to pose as his mother as he enrolled into Lincoln Northwest High School before transferring to Southeast where he asked for “pornographic material” from female student.

Between February and March 2023, Scheich sent sexually explicit messages to both a 13 and 14-year-old student.

He also tried to get the 13-year-old to meet up with him for sex, and even sent her money encouraging her to send nude pictures to him, KETV reported, citing an arrest affidavit.

Scheich was arrested on July 20, 2023 at a local library after police received a tip of an alleged impersonator posing as “Zak Hess” who had contacted female students by phone or computers.

The 5-foot-4, 120-pound monster, who graduated from Southeast High in 2015, reportedly cost the Lincoln Public Schools $6,000.

The district faced questions about how a man in his mid-20s managed to enroll in the first place following last year’s arrest.

Schools security chief Joe Wright said the minimum requirements for enrolling in a public high school are a birth certificate, immunization records and transcripts.

At the sentencing, Deputy County Attorney Amber Scholte described Scheich as “the worst kind of predator.”

“He targeted, groomed and lured them via social media,” Scholte said. “He did so under the guise of being their peer, their friend, and in some cases, their boyfriend. And he did so for his own sexual purpose and gratification.”

Navarro, who has acted under the pseudonym Danielle Hess, was arrested and charged with criminal impersonation.

She pleaded not guilty to the charge in April and was released from jail on a $450 bail.