The fate of Floridians’ right to directly amend the state constitution is now in the hands of a federal judge, following a nine-day trial weighing the legality of a new state law known as HB 1205 that significantly restricts the citizens’ ballot initiative process.

Campaign workers who brought the lawsuit argue the outcome of the case before U.S. District Judge Mark Walker could reverberate nationwide, as lawmakers across the country seek to constrain voters’ access to direct democracy. 

For years, voters have used the amendment process to enact popular and major changes in Florida law from environmental regulations to public education, often over the objections of the state’s Republican leaders, who are now on the verge of snuffing out a perennial political thorn in their side.

“Florida is a canary in the coal mine,” said Mitch Emerson, executive director of Florida Decides Healthcare. The campaign had been organizing to get a measure on the 2026 ballot to expand Medicaid, a move that could extend health care coverage to hundreds of thousands of Floridians.  

“If this blueprint stands, other states will copy this,” he said of Florida’s restrictive new law.

Passed in 2025, the new law represents the culmination of a yearslong effort by state officials to rein in Floridians’ fundamental right to amend the constitution through a series of cumbersome regulations, steep fines and the specter of criminal liability. 

A coalition of campaigns argued this month in federal court that the new law puts the citizen amendment process “even more out of reach of all but the wealthiest special interests” that can afford to navigate the bureaucratic hurdles state officials have put into place. Under the new law, it’s now a third-degree felony for people to collect more than 25 petitions, other than their own and direct family members’, if they don’t register with the state. It also bans non-Florida residents, non-U.S. citizens and people with felony convictions from collecting petitions, and creates stricter deadlines and harsher penalties for campaigns to return the forms.

The campaigns argue the new restrictions illegally undermine constitutional rights to core political speech and free association, while state officials told Walker the new law regulates conduct, not political speech, and that the provisions are needed to prevent fraud and promote transparency. 

A check on power

At trial, Walker, an Obama appointee, called the state’s claimed evidence of high rates of invalid petitions – presented as an analysis from the state Office of Election Crimes and Security – “beyond junk science.” The Tallahassee-based judge has repeatedly found DeSantis-era policies and laws unconstitutional, and it’s widely expected the state will appeal any adverse ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, an outcome Walker himself acknowledged during the trial.

For now, however, HB 1205 has already made an impact: Florida Decides Healthcare, the lead plaintiff on the case, has been forced to delay its Medicaid expansion push until the 2028 cycle because campaign staff and volunteers alike fear the potential criminal penalties and crushing fines that HB 1205 created.

It’s a deeply personal issue for Emerson, who recounted his family’s struggles to pay for a young cousin’s cancer treatment, and the immense grief when she died after the family ran out of money.

“Health care policy and things like this are not abstract,” he said. “They are life and death.”

Whether Floridians will be able to decide for themselves to expand Medicaid, or legalize adult use of recreational marijuana, or enshrine a right to clean water, or vote directly on any number of other important questions of public policy, may depend on the outcome of the federal trial.

“This case is about preserving the last remaining check on power here in Florida,” Emerson said.

Criminal penalties for community organizing

In the long leadup to 2018, Desmond Meade was doing the politically unthinkable. 

The law school graduate with a felony criminal record was organizing a longshot, grassroots campaign to restore voting rights to people like him – Floridians with felony convictions. 

It was a landmark policy change to dismantle legal barriers first enacted in 1868, opening a path to voting rights for an estimated 1.4 million people.

One of the keys to the campaign’s improbable success on the ballot in 2018 was the organizing volunteers did in unlikely places – Trump rallies, biker bars and spots like Gwendolyn’s Cafe, a diner in Ft. Myers frequented by people recovering from addiction. 

“There was no place that we weren’t willing to go,” Meade recalled. “Nothing was off-limits.”

Many of the staff and regulars at Gwendolyn’s Cafe couldn’t vote, but many of their families and friends could. Floridians locked out of the mainstream political process were empowered to talk to neighbors, strangers and political opponents, convincing them, one person at a time, to sign a petition to put a measure on the ballot to change the state Constitution. 

“Those who are closest to the pain are often the ones that are closest to the solution,” Meade said.

A decade later, Gwendolyn’s Cafe has shuttered. And the petition gathering that took place there would now be illegal, because HB 1205 bans people with felony convictions from collecting petitions for ballot initiatives if they haven’t had their rights restored. It’s all but certain Meade’s unlikely grassroots campaign – the last successful push of its kind – would not succeed today. 

Would-be volunteers now have to weigh the risk of their advocacy, as they consider working to advance policies that state officials have demonstrated their willingness to fight against with aggressive state power. 

‘The people needed a voice’

Half a century ago, Florida was at a constitutional crossroads. 

The rapidly growing and quickly diversifying state was straining under an antiquated political and legal system that was ill-suited to the changing realities of post-World War II America and the triumph and tumult of the Civil Rights Era. 

In the early 1960s, Florida was speeding toward the new millennium and becoming the epicenter of the U.S.-Soviet Space Race, yet the state was still operating under its 1885 Constitution, a post-Reconstruction-era relic that enshrined school segregation and banned interracial marriage “forever”. 

Under that constitution, Florida’s system for divvying up state legislative districts was tied to the state’s 1880s-era population patterns, concentrating power in the rural, largely white strongholds of North Florida, while South Florida boomed with newcomers, from across the country and around the Caribbean. Critics said that malapportionment distorted the focus of the Legislature, leaving it out of touch with the needs of modern Florida.

Ultimately, state lawmakers resistant to ceding their own power were forced to redraw the district maps, following a series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings. Reformers decided the need for structural change was so great, they overhauled the entire constitution, ushering in a new political system for the modern era, one that was specifically crafted to be more responsive to voters. 

Florida’s 1968 Constitution was animated by a spirit of reform and “designed to transfer power from the government to the people,” according to Florida constitutional historian Mary Adkins, who is a professor emerita at the University of Florida College of Law.

The shapers of the new constitution were intent on including a provision granting voters the ability to place proposed constitutional amendments directly on the ballot – and it wasn’t controversial, Adkins said. 

One of the drafters, a powerful lobbyist named Robert Ervin, told Adkins in the twilight of his life that the provision he was proudest of in the new constitution was the citizens’ initiative. 

“The people needed a voice,” Adkins recalled him saying. “And the people did not have a voice.”

‘The government’s power grab’

For years, Florida voters have used their voice through the citizens’ initiative, sidestepping the Republican-dominated Legislature and passing policies that lawmakers refused to advance, from creating universal pre-K and raising the minimum wage to implementing legislative term limits and legalizing medical marijuana. 

And for years, state legislators have worked to constrain the process, in what Adkins has described as “the government’s power grab” that has so far “gone unchecked.”

“I don’t think anyone would disagree that they were doing it to make citizens’ initiatives more difficult to obtain,” Adkins said.

HB 1205 represents the high-water mark of a yearslong, multipronged effort to carve away at the citizens’ initiative and reflects a national push to crackdown on direct democracy.

It was “death by a thousand cuts,” Emerson testified in federal court in the trial challenging HB 1205.

The passage of the new state law has further centralized power in Tallahassee, with state officials announcing that no citizens’ initiatives have qualified for the 2026 ballot under the new requirements – a pronouncement that at least one campaign has called premature.

For decades, lawmakers have been raising the bar to qualify for the ballot and undermining implementation when measures are passed – tightening regulations on the language of amendments, shortening the lifetime of how long voters’ petitions are valid and enacting narrower deadlines and tougher penalties for when petitions must be returned to elections officials.

Following the 2018 passage of the measure restoring voting rights to people with felony convictions who had completed “all terms of their sentence,” Florida lawmakers enacted a bill defining “all terms” to include payment of fines and fees, a requirement critics decried as a poll tax. 

In the leadup to the 2024 election, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration used millions of dollars in taxpayers funds to campaign against proposed initiatives to legalize recreational marijuana and enshrine abortion rights. State officials threatened TV stations that aired ads in support of the reproductive rights measure and state police knocked on the doors of voters who signed petitions for the initiative. 

For years, lawmakers have cast aspersions on the citizen initiative process, citing concerns about election security. Last year, state officials reported that “at least 17” paid petition circulators had been arrested since 2022. Still, experts say there’s no evidence of widespread fraud in past election cycles and that pre-HB 1205 regulations made fraud rare and risky. 

What many citizen-driven proposals have had in common, however, is that they would advance more progressive goals than Florida’s Republican leadership wants.

What voters lost

Melissa Martin is one of the scores of people who have turned to the citizens’ initiative process in the hopes of making Florida more just and more liveable. 

Under HB 1205, it’s now illegal for Martin, a Florida native who now lives in Oregon, to collect voters’ petitions. 

A Marine Corps veteran, attorney and environmental advocate, Martin led the grassroots campaign to get a measure on the 2026 ballot to create a constitutional right to clean water. The effort, which was sidelined by HB 1205, was fully run by unpaid volunteers – a dying breed in Florida’s political ecosystem.

Martin testified in federal court that she saw the citizens’ initiative process as “the only way the political system would correct itself” in a state where powerful corporate interests hold sway in the Capitol and are allowed to pollute Florida waterways and divert millions of gallons from its treasured freshwater springs. 

The citizens’ initiative process gives voters the power to recognize a problem and take direct action to solve it, with the stroke of a pen, Martin said.

“That is exactly what we need and it is exactly what 1205 took away from us,” she testified. 

In the meantime, Florida voters are heading into another high-stakes election cycle without the ability to vote on citizens’ initiatives.

“It is one of the only ways everyday Floridians can take a tangible, immediate action to change the Constitution,” Emerson said. “When government makes it impossible for citizens to exercise that right, it stops being a democracy in practice.”

Kate Payne is The Florida Trib’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org.