A campaign that could extend health care coverage to an estimated half a million Floridians has been suspended, and a push to legalize adult use of marijuana may unravel before it ever reaches the ballot.
That’s the reality of new ballot initiative restrictions, approved by the Florida Legislature, and enforced by state officials — restrictions that advocates say make the process effectively impossible for grassroots campaigns to navigate.
For Floridians, that means losing opportunities to make major policy decisions for themselves.
“The grassroots, neighbor-to-neighbor, community-led organizing has been shut down and criminalized,” said Hailey Hall, a geologist who has volunteered to collect petitions for the Florida Right To Clean Water ballot initiative in the past.
“People don’t really realize that the floor has come out from under them,” Hall added.
A test case
Two years ago, a decisive majority of Florida voters – more than 5.9 million people – voted to legalize recreational marijuana in the state. But that ballot initiative failed, despite 55.9% voting in favor, because of Florida’s requirement that constitutional amendments garner at least 60% of the vote.
Florida is the only state to require all ballot initiatives to clear the 60% threshold, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures — a high bar that Florida voters set for themselves.
For the second election cycle in a row, campaign organizers allege that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration is improperly interfering with a proposed constitutional amendment that would legalize recreational marijuana. The governor’s critics say state officials are using tactics that amount to an illegal undermining of citizens’ rights to amend the state Constitution.
Smart & Safe Florida, the campaign to get the marijuana measure before voters this year, is racing against a Feb. 1 deadline to amass the more than 880,000 verified voter petitions required by state law to get on the ballot – and the campaign appears to be 120,000 signatures short, according to preliminary numbers posted on the Secretary of State’s website.
If the campaign clears the signature requirement, there are further steps before placement on the ballot is assured. If the Department of State finds the campaign has fallen short, legal challenges are likely.
With just days remaining ahead of that critical deadline, the recreational marijuana issue represents a test case of whether citizens’ initiatives can still make it to the ballot in Florida, at a time when state leaders and legislators have made the feat staggeringly difficult to accomplish.
What’s at stake: a key tool Florida voters have used to bypass the GOP-dominated Legislature and usher in broadly popular policies, which represents a check on power when voters feel their lawmakers aren’t representing their interests.
The marijuana campaign’s attorneys argue that delays triggered by state officials pose a “potentially catastrophic effect” on the proposed measure’s future that “threatens to silence” Florida voters.
Smart & Safe has been largely bankrolled by Trulieve, one of the country’s largest cannabis companies, which has contributed more than $50 million so far this election cycle.
The campaign declined interview requests for this story but issued a statement, saying state officials are “using every means necessary to stifle the voices of over a million Florida voters who have lawfully and legally signed petitions.”
“It seems there is nothing that will stop the administration from preventing these voters from having their say,” a campaign spokesperson said.
Representatives for DeSantis and other state officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Harnessing the will of the people
Petition organizers now wistfully recall their past ballot victories.
Watching the election results roll in on Nov. 6, 2018, surrounded by family members and supporters at an Orlando hotel, Desmond Meade witnessed firsthand the joy of Floridians realizing they would finally regain their right to vote, after believing they would be locked out of their own democracy forever.
Meade served as the lead organizer of the successful 2018 citizens’ ballot initiative to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions. He said he fundamentally believes that American democracy is made stronger and more vibrant when more people participate in it.
“The will of the people” was “an amazing thing to behold,” he recalled.
Recent efforts to restrict the ballot process undermine the promise of direct democracy, he said.
“Part of the essence of our democracy is lost when the citizens are not able to fully engage in it,” Meade said.
A powerful tool to bypass the Legislature
For decades, Florida voters have exercised their right to put forward amendments to the state Constitution, part of a long history of voter referendums that dates back to the founding of the Republic.
Former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Canady has called voting on constitutional amendments one of “the most important rights enjoyed by the people of Florida.” The Republican president of the Florida Senate, Ben Albritton, has described the citizens’ initiative process as “sacrosanct.”
In recent years, Floridians have turned to citizens’ initiatives to pass a slate of landmark policy changes that enjoy wide public support, but that the Republican-dominated Legislature has refused to advance.
Those successes included restoring voting rights to people with felony convictions, setting term limits for state lawmakers, legalizing medical marijuana, and raising the minimum wage.
This process is not without its detractors, across the political spectrum. A 2002 amendment related to the confinement of pregnant pigs became the poster child for critics that said it made a mockery of Florida’s Constitution.
That “pregnant pigs” issue helped trigger a 2006 vote to raise Florida’s passage rate for constitutional amendments to 60%, with lawmakers successfully convincing voters to protect the sanctity of the Constitution — instead of their own power.
In one of the abiding ironies of Florida politics, that measure passed with 57% of the vote, not enough to clear the new bar it set.
Lawmakers tighten the reins
Florida has long had some of the country’s strictest requirements for citizens’ ballot initiatives. Since the creation of Florida’s process in 1968, only 44 of the measures have passed, an average of less than two per election cycle and a fraction of the total approved in other states, where voters have backed hundreds of citizens-driven amendments by simple majority votes.
Still, Florida legislators have continually passed new laws to constrain the process — part of a trend of lawmakers across the country restricting voters’ access to direct democracy.
Last year, Florida lawmakers implemented the tightest regulations yet, enacting shorter deadlines and harsher penalties for those carrying out citizens’ initiatives, in an effort to rein in what legislators say is a system that undermines their power and is corrupted by deep-pocketed special interests and tainted by fraud.
Last year, state elections officials reported that “at least 10” paid petition circulators had been convicted, with more arrests and convictions reported this year.
“Over the past few election cycles it has become apparent that our citizen initiative process is broken,” said Republican state Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, speaking last year while presenting the bill known as HB 1205 that created the new restrictions.
HB 1205 ushered in sweeping changes to the citizens’ initiative process just six months after a clear majority of Florida voters approved constitutional amendments to legalize recreational marijuana and to enshrine abortion rights — though both proposals failed to clear the 60% threshold required by state law.
Critics decried the bill as a calculated crackdown on grassroots voter power that will lock out all but the most powerful and wealthy interests, exacerbating concerns that Florida’s ballot initiative process has been co-opted by corporations.
The Fairness Project, an advocacy group that has backed progressive ballot initiatives across the country, called the measure one of the nation’s “most comprehensive and blatant attacks on direct democracy” — criticisms the bill’s supporters have dismissed.
“This bill is not an attack on the citizen initiative process,” co-sponsor Republican state Sen. Don Gaetz said while defending the bill last year. “It’s an attack on those who have corrupted it.”
More regulations, higher costs
Under the new law, it’s now a third-degree felony for people to collect more than 25 signed ballot petitions, other than their own or those of immediate family members, if they don’t first register with the state as a petition circulator. Signers must now also write either the last four digits of their Social Security number or their driver’s license number on petitions.
Additionally, non-U.S. citizens and non-Florida residents can no longer collect petitions — provisions that campaigners have challenged in court as unconstitutional. Those with felony convictions, who have not had their rights restored, are also barred from collecting petitions. And the measure significantly narrows the window for when organizers must return voters’ petitions, and campaigns could rack up thousands of dollars in fines if they miss the new deadlines.
“All of these restrictions are not just bad policy, they’re unconstitutional,” said Heather Szilagyi, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, which is challenging the new law in federal court.
Campaigns suspend 2026 operations
Organizers and experts say the risks of collecting petitions have become too much for many everyday citizens to shoulder, and the costs too expensive for all but the wealthiest, corporate-backed campaigns.
Matthew Grocholske, a progressive activist who was a field organizer on 2024’s abortion rights campaign, Floridians Protecting Freedom, and has collected petitions for multiple other initiatives, said there’s been a noticeable contraction in the number of volunteers, churches and civic groups willing to participate in the process.
“Volunteers are scared to collect petitions,” Grocholske said.
Asked if the abortion measure could have made it on the ballot under the new restrictions, Grocholske’s assessment was “absolutely not.”
“The reason why I think the marijuana ballot initiative is still possible is because it is heavily backed by corporations,” Grocholske said.
As lawmakers have added new regulations to the initiative process – including measures meant to reduce fraud and increase transparency – the cost of running a campaign has ballooned.
In 1976, the average cost to get on the ballot was $45,000, but by 1990, the costs rose to over $1 million, according to a 1997 analysis published by the Florida Bar.
More recent campaigns have spent well over $100 million, including Smart & Safe.
Under the new rules, at least two campaigns have called off their 2026 operations: Florida Decides Healthcare, a push to expand Medicaid in the state, and Florida Right To Clean Water or RTCW, an effort to create a fundamental right to healthy waters, with RTCW saying the state’s restrictions made it “virtually impossible” for grassroots organizations to get a citizens’ initiative on the ballot this election cycle.
A key deadline looms
In trying to land the recreational marijuana question on the 2026 ballot, Smart & Safe Florida faces not only the stiff restrictions of state law, but the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is adamantly opposed to the proposal.
“There’s a lot of different perspectives on marijuana,” DeSantis told reporters last year. “It should not be in our Constitution.”
Last cycle, the DeSantis administration spent millions of dollars in public funds to campaign against the proposed marijuana and abortion measures, the Tampa Bay Times found, including using state agencies to threaten broadcasters and produce negative ads.
And local prosecutors have been investigating the transfer of $10 million in state Medicaid settlement funds from the foundation associated with first lady Casey DeSantis’ signature initiative to two nonprofits, which in turn gave millions to a political committee chaired by the governor’s then-chief of staff James Uthmeier. That committee campaigned heavily against the 2024 recreational marijuana measure, which ultimately failed.
Heading into the 2026 election, Smart & Safe has accused DeSantis administration officials of improperly and illegally blocking the campaign from moving forward at multiple turns, posing procedural stumbling blocks that attorneys say threaten to end the proposal before it ever gets on the ballot.
This week, Uthmeier, who is now the state’s attorney general, announced he’s expanding criminal investigations into Smart & Safe, alleging some of the campaign’s petition circulators have engaged in fraud that “touches nearly all of Florida’s 67 counties.” His office has directed all of the state’s county supervisors of elections to turn over petitions submitted by workers suspected of fraud.
Earlier this month, Uthmeier heralded the arrest of a paid petition circulator from Titusville who is accused of submitting fraudulent voter registrations while working on behalf of Smart & Safe.
Uthmeier has also asked the state Supreme Court to invalidate the entire ballot measure, which he argues misleads voters and doesn’t meet the state’s single-subject requirements.
In recent months, the marijuana campaign has filed a flurry of lawsuits against Secretary of State Cord Byrd, alleging, among other things, that the DeSantis appointee failed to post timely updates on how many voter petitions have been verified, as required by state law.
The campaign has also challenged a Department of State memo directing local election officials to invalidate petitions signed by inactive voters, who are registered to vote, but haven’t responded to a final notice from the state seeking to confirm their address.
It’s a move that goes against the Department’s own guidance and would bar more than 2.5 million registered voters from signing a petition, according to an analysis by University of Florida political scientist Daniel Smith, who was hired as an expert witness on a federal lawsuit challenging HB 1205.
In legal filings, state officials have defended the memo, going so far as to say that “Inactive voters are not qualified to vote,” a position that appears contrary to state law and the department’s own guidance.
A circuit court judge initially sided with Smart & Safe, finding the state acted illegally when it moved to invalidate more than 70,000 registered voters’ petitions. The judge directed local election officials to disregard the state’s memo and tally inactive voters’ petitions, if they were otherwise valid. That order has since been paused by an appeals court, which represents a major blow to the campaign just days ahead of the qualifying deadline.
A federal trial challenging the new law is slated to begin Feb. 9, as multiple campaigns try to unravel what they argue are unconstitutional constraints on Florida’s citizens’ initiative process — restrictions that have already significantly curtailed voters’ abilities to petition their government, at least for this election cycle.
For Hall, the geologist and onetime campaign volunteer, the damage to direct democracy has already been done.
“It did what it was supposed to do,” said Hall, who called Florida’s new rules a “criminalization of political activity.”
“And I think we need to feel that for what it is,” Hall said.
Kate Payne is The Tributary’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org.
