By a 43 to 36 percent margin, voters say they would reject Initiative 147, which would repeal the current ban on cyanide leach mining, require some environmental safeguards not mandatory before the ban went into effect, and restore mining rights that have since expired. Twenty-one percent were undecided.
The poll, a telephone survey of 625 likely Montana voters, was conducted Sept. 20-22 by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. for Lee Newspapers of Montana. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Canyon Resources Corp., of Golden, Colo., has been the major benefactor behind the vote, hiring the woman who wrote the initiative and giving $1.3 million of in-kind donations to the effort or about 96 percent of all the money supporters of the initiative have raised. Canyon had hoped to build a large cyanide leach gold mine near Lincoln when Montana voters approved the cyanide ban in 1998 by a 52 to 48 percent margin.
Some of the company's mining leases have since expired, but I-147 would re-instate them if the initiative passes. The company has been suing the state over the ban since shortly after its passage.
Opinions about the ban have not changed since late May, when the last Lee Newspapers poll was conducted. At that time, 43 percent supported keeping the ban, 38 percent opposed it and 19 percent were undecided.
In another issue on the November ballot, Montanans surveyed overwhelmingly support changing the state's constitution to enshrine the right of Montanans to hunt and fish. Some 53 percent of those surveyed said they would support the change, called Constitutional Amendment 41. Only 14 percent were against the change, and 33 percent were undecided.
The amendment garnered about equal support among men and women.
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