Nebraska Supreme Court Upholds Medical Marijuana Ballot Laws

September 4, 2026

Photo by Алексей Васильев via Pexels.

Nebraska voters approved medical marijuana by a landslide in November 2024 — both companion measures cleared 65% support, the kind of margin that leaves little room to argue the outcome was a fluke or the product of confused ballot language. Yet more than a year later, patients in the state still couldn't legally access a regulated program, tied up not by voters or lawmakers but by a courtroom fight over petition signatures. That fight is now over. The Nebraska Supreme Court has unanimously upheld the initiatives, rejecting a legal challenge that argued fraud in the signature-gathering process should have kept the measures off the ballot entirely.

The ruling doesn't just settle the fate of these two laws. It draws a line for how much proof is required before a court will start tossing out voter signatures, a question that matters well beyond cannabis policy in a state where citizen initiatives are a regular feature of the political process.

What the Court Actually Decided

Photo by The New York Public Library via Unsplash.

The decision, authored by Chief Justice Jeffrey Funke and joined by all seven justices, affirmed a November 2024 ruling from Lancaster County District Judge Susan Strong. Strong had already found that the challengers hadn't come close to proving enough signatures were invalid to sink either petition — and the Supreme Court agreed there was no basis to disturb that finding.

The numbers tell the story plainly. Each measure needed at least 86,499 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. The Secretary of State's office had certified 89,962 signatures for one measure and 89,856 for the other — cushions of roughly 3,400 and 3,300 signatures above the threshold. Strong's own order had found that Secretary of State Bob Evnen would have needed to disqualify around 3,400 signatures per measure to knock either one below the line. Instead, the evidence presented only supported stripping presumptive validity from fewer than 830 signatures total.

That gap is the whole case. Challengers didn't need to show that some notaries cut corners or that a handful of signature-gatherers behaved badly — isolated problems happen in nearly every large-scale petition drive. They needed to show a volume of disqualifiable signatures large enough to actually change the outcome, and they fell well short of that bar. With both measures having already cleared the 2024 ballot with more than 65% voter approval, the court had a clean, math-based reason to leave the results untouched.

The Fraud Allegations Behind the Lawsuit

Photo by Vitaly Gariev via Unsplash.

The lawsuit came from former state Sen. John Kuehn of Heartwell, a veterinarian and longtime, vocal opponent of medical marijuana who has spent years arguing against legalization efforts in Nebraska. His suit alleged widespread fraud and notarial malfeasance in how signatures were collected and notarized for the petitions, aiming to have enough signatures thrown out to disqualify both measures retroactively.

The case took an unusual procedural turn along the way. Kuehn originally sued Secretary of State Evnen, whose office had certified the signatures. But when Attorney General Mike Hilgers' office stepped in to defend Evnen, it largely ended up arguing alongside Kuehn and against Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana, the campaign that had run the petition drive — putting the state's top legal office in the position of defending an official while attacking the outcome that official had certified.

Even in ruling against the challenge, the justices left the door open for a different outcome under different facts. Justice William Cassel's concurrence noted that proof of widespread, pervasive notarial failure, or evidence of a deliberate, organized fraud scheme, could in a future case justify shifting the burden onto petition organizers to affirmatively prove the validity of affected signatures. Justice Stephanie Stacy's opinion, meanwhile, leaned the other direction — stressing that courts should preserve the right of initiative to the fullest extent the law allows, treating direct democracy as something to be protected rather than second-guessed absent strong evidence. Together, the opinions set a working standard: sloppy paperwork or scattered irregularities won't unwind an election, but a proven, systemic fraud scheme still might.

Reaction From Medical Marijuana Advocates

Photo by Kindel Media via Pexels.

Crista Eggers, executive director of Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana, didn't mince words about what the ruling meant to her organization. She called it a rejection of an attempt by elected officials to override the will of voters through the courts rather than through any legitimate accounting of fraud.

That framing gets at the real stakes advocates saw in this case. To Eggers and others involved in the campaign, the lawsuit was never really about a handful of bad notarizations — it was a test of whether officials who opposed a ballot measure on policy grounds could use litigation as a backstop after losing at the polls. A 65%-plus win is about as decisive as election results get in a statewide vote, and advocates argued that if a challenge like this one could succeed on the thin evidence presented, it would hand opponents of any future initiative a roadmap for tying up popular measures in court indefinitely.

For patients who voted for the program and businesses that began planning around it, the ruling closes out roughly a year and a half of legal limbo. That's a long stretch for people managing chronic conditions to wait on a program they'd already voted to create, and it's a long stretch for anyone hoping to build a compliant business to sink money into planning without knowing if the underlying law would survive.

Beyond this specific case, advocates are treating the unanimous 7-0 outcome as a meaningful precedent — a signal that Nebraska's courts will require real, quantified evidence before undoing a citizen initiative, not just allegations or isolated irregularities.

What's Still Unresolved

Photo by Elijah Mears via Unsplash.

The Supreme Court's ruling closes one chapter, but it doesn't clear the runway entirely. Kuehn has a second, separate lawsuit pending that argues Nebraska's medical cannabis laws conflict with federal law and should be struck down on preemption grounds — a distinct legal theory from the signature-fraud claims just rejected, and one that could take considerable time to resolve.

Meanwhile, the voter-created Medical Cannabis Commission is still working through the regulatory groundwork needed before any patient can legally obtain product. That includes rewriting proposed regulations and settling a fee structure for licensees, none of which has been finalized. State lawmakers granted the commission authority to actually collect fees during the 2026 legislative session, and the commission's next meeting is scheduled for September 14 — a date worth watching for anyone tracking how close the program is to actually issuing licenses.

There's also a separate, unrelated criminal investigation underway involving alleged petition fraud tied to at least eight measures from the 2026 election cycle, including Lincoln City Charter amendments and statewide ballot questions. That probe has nothing directly to do with the medical marijuana case, but it has raised the political temperature around petition integrity generally. Gov. Jim Pillen and other state officials have already called for reforms to how signatures are gathered and verified, and any changes that come out of that push could reshape the rules for future ballot campaigns — cannabis-related or otherwise.

None of this changes the bottom line for now: Nebraska's Supreme Court has settled the legal question over whether these two medical marijuana measures were validly enacted, and the answer is yes. But settled law and an operating program are two different things, and Nebraska isn't at the second point yet.

Anyone with a real stake in this — a patient hoping to get a recommendation, an entrepreneur eyeing a license, a caregiver trying to plan — should keep an eye on two things specifically. First, the Medical Cannabis Commission's September 14 meeting, where fee structures and regulations that determine when licenses can actually be issued are still being hashed out. Second, the pending federal preemption lawsuit, which could still complicate implementation even though the fraud-based challenge has failed. Given how much can shift between a court ruling and a functioning dispensary shelf, it's worth confirming the program's actual current status — through the commission or a knowledgeable local attorney — before assuming legal medical cannabis access exists in Nebraska today. As always, cannabis law varies significantly by state, and what's true in Nebraska this month may not hold in six.