The Smart & Safe Florida campaign, Florida’s Citizen Ballot Initiative, is on life support, but it’s not dead yet. The campaign’s well-financed effort to add recreational marijuana to the Florida Constitution has submitted more than 1.7 million signatures. The requirement to make it to the ballot is about 880,000 signatures by February 1st. The DeSantis Administration’s procedural games successfully blocked this effort, which fell short of the petition goal by less than 100,000 signatures. This is important because if the campaign does not succeed in placing its question on the ballot, then Florida’s constitutionally protected citizen initiative effectively dies. This would send a signal to other states to replicate this effort. These procedural games will also have a meaningful impact on vote-by-mail and on candidates’ ability to qualify by petition.

The DeSantis Administration’s procedural games rely on invalidating already validated petitions through administrative directives:

1) To invalidate petitions collected by mail retroactively applying a law change six months after those petitions were first validated.

2) To invalidate petitions signed by “inactive” voters, those who haven’t voted in at least 2 election cycles but are still allowed to vote.

3) To invalidate petitions collected by out-of-state petition gatherers after a new law change banned their use.

4) To not count validated petitions, submitted prior to the deadline by the campaign, because the county supervisor of elections transmitted the new count to the state after the deadline.

It’s not over yet for this effort. The campaign can still overcome the shortfall. There are over 54,000 validated petitions reported by county supervisors of elections, and another 70,646 invalidated after-the-fact petitions being contested in court. The deadline to place referendum questions on the November ballot is still months away.

Over the next 60 days, the campaign will ask the courts to intervene (as here) and require the state to justify its actions that affect our right to petition the government.

Respectfully submitted,

Hector Roos
Director of Strategic Planning
Florida Cannabis Action Network
www.flcan.org