Massachusetts Voters Ready To Legalize Marijuana 2012 News Junkie Post / By Steve Elliott
November 8, 2010 | Voters in Massachusetts appear to be ready to legalize marijuana in 2012, according to an analysis of the votes on local cannabis legalization advisory ballot questions last Tuesday.
Massachusetts allows for citizens to place non-binding local “public policy questions” on the ballot. And voters in several precincts weighed in this year on whether their local representatives should “vote in favor of legislation that would allow the state to regulate and tax the marijuana in the same manner as alcohol.”
More than 150,000 votes were cast on the marijuana issue across Massachusetts, in districts containing about 8.5 percent of the total vote.
In the districts where pot policy was on the ballot, the advisory question passed with an overwhelming 61 percent of the vote, but these districts were slightly more liberal than the rest of the state, reports Jon Walker at Firedoglake. So to determine how those results might translate to a statewide marijuana legalization ballot question, Walker used two different metrics to analyze the data.
Walker’s analysis led him to conclude that a small majority of the individuals who turned out to vote this year in Massachusetts supported legalizing and regulating cannabis in the same way the state does alcohol.
“This is a good sign for marijuana reform given that midterm elections tend to have much lower turnouts among young voters,” Walker said, “who are, in general, more supportive of legalization — and this midterm in particular had a higher than normal turnout among older conservatives, who tend not to support marijuana reform.
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