Nebraska is reinstating the death penalty after residents voted to restore the measure Tuesday.
With all of the precincts in Nebraska accounted for, 66.1 percent voted in favor of Referendum 426 and 33.6 percent against, according to NBC News, which overturned the 2015 decision to forbid the death penalty.
A majority of state legislators voted for a bill to repeal the practice just last year. Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts vetoed the measure, in which the lawmakers then overrode his veto.
A group of pro-death penalty activists then gathered 150,000 signatures supporting the reinstitution of the death penalty, rather than having life without parole being the maximum sentence. (RELATED: A Jury Is More Likely To Rule Guilty If The Video Evidence Is In Slow Motion)
Ricketts promised that capital punishment would be back on the ballot this year and spent $300,000 of his and his father’s money on a petition drive to make sure it happened.
Some residents of Nebraska were apparently confused by the language of the ballot initiative, according to TIME, since a vote to “Retain” didn’t mean retaining the right of the state to exercise capital punishment, but rather the right to retain the legislation in place that forbids the death penalty.
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