Supporters of recreational marijuana ballot proposal accuse DeSantis administration of violating Florida petition law
Racing against a Feb. 1 deadline, supporters of a recreational-marijuana ballot proposal are accusing Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration of violating a law that requires state elections officials to determine the number of valid petition signatures and publicly post the information on a weekly basis.
Smart & Safe Florida, the political committee behind the proposal for the November ballot, filed a lawsuit Friday asking a judge to order Secretary of State Cord Byrd and his office to "comply with their statutory obligations" to update the number of valid petition signatures. The number has remained unchanged on the agency's website for the past two months.
The lawsuit, filed in Leon County circuit court, is among the latest salvos in an acrimonious dispute over the proposed constitutional amendment, which would allow people ages 21 and older to use recreational marijuana. DeSantis, who helped defeat a similar measure in 2024, fiercely opposes the proposal.
Smart & Safe Florida has until Feb. 1 to submit at least 880,062 valid petition signatures and meet threshold signature requirements in congressional districts for placement on the ballot.
The secretary of state's website on Tuesday showed that Smart & Safe has submitted 675,307 valid signatures — a number that has not budged since Nov. 23, according to the lawsuit — although county supervisors of elections have posted information showing additional petitions have been verified and sent to the state over the past two months.
The committee has submitted more than 1 million signatures to county elections supervisors and believes that more than 700,000 signatures have been verified, the lawsuit said.
"Without timely reported data from the state, Smart & Safe is essentially flying blind as to its ballot placement status and is left guessing where it needs to deploy its assets to ensure it makes both the statewide requirement and the congressional district requirement," lawyers for the committee wrote.
Under Florida law, local supervisors of elections and Byrd's office were required to begin publicly posting updated numbers of valid signatures on a weekly basis on Dec. 1. The weekly updates are supposed to continue through the Feb. 1 deadline.
The mandatory public-notice requirement "is crucial for a citizen initiative sponsor such as Smart & Safe who is managing a statewide petition campaign to satisfy the numerical and congressional district distribution signature requirements under Florida law," the lawsuit said.
State election officials' "failure to follow the law unduly impinges on Smart & Safe's ability to do so," the lawyers added.
Acknowledging the time crunch before the Feb. 1 deadline, Circuit Judge Jonathan Sjostrom on Tuesday set an expedited schedule in the case and asked for additional briefing to be completed before Friday.
Judge splits on Florida marijuana petition signatures, prompting appeals from state and initiative supporters
The court clash over the updated petition numbers came amid legal wrangling about state efforts to invalidate petition signatures.
In a separate lawsuit, Sjostrom on Friday found that state elections officials improperly directed invalidating about 42,000 petitions signed by what are known as "inactive" voters. But Friday's decision also sided in part with state officials and upheld a separate directive to invalidate nearly 29,000 petitions collected for the marijuana initiative by out-of-state petition gatherers.
Lawyers for Byrd and Smart & Safe Florida are appealing Sjostrom's decisions at the 1st District Court of Appeal, with the state challenging part of the ruling dealing with inactive voters and the committee appealing the part of the ruling about out-of-state petition gatherers.
Sjostrom on Friday issued an order allowing his ruling to stay in place while the appeals play out — a decision that the state's attorneys also are appealing.
The appellate court on Monday rejected a request by Smart & Safe Florida to send the dispute directly to the Florida Supreme Court, but set up an expedited schedule that required briefing to be completed before Friday.
As the litigation intensifies and the Feb. 1 deadline rapidly approaches, elections supervisors are struggling to keep pace with a number of directives issued by Byrd's office about invalidating petitions or making changes to the signature-validation process.
"We're literally going through boxes of the same petitions over and over again," David Ramba, executive director of the Florida Supervisors of Elections association, told The News Service of Florida on Tuesday.
Supervisors are trying "to provide consistent service and follow the law," according to Ramba.
"Between court cases and the directives, we're getting a different interpretation, it seems like, weekly. In some cases it seems daily," he added.
DeSantis and Uthmeier led efforts to quash the marijuana initiative
The directives from Byrd's office are just one front in DeSantis' and Attorney General James Uthmeier's efforts to quash the recreational-marijuana initiative.
As DeSantis' chief of staff in 2024, Uthmeier also headed Keep Florida Clean, a political committee that targeted that year's recreational-marijuana proposal. The committee has come under scrutiny amid Leon County prosecutors' investigations into potential wrongdoing associated with First Lady Casey DeSantis' signature Hope Florida assistance program.
Uthmeier on Tuesday announced a "major escalation" in the Office of Statewide Prosecution's investigation into election fraud related to the recreational-marijuana signature-gathering efforts.
Uthmeier's office launched 46 new criminal investigations and issued four subpoenas seeking records from Smart & Safe Florida and its contractors and subcontractors about potentially fraudulent petitions, according to a news release.
The investigations found that about 50 petition circulators associated with the recreational-marijuana effort submitted 14,500 petitions that "raised significant concerns," including 7,100 that were validated by county elections supervisors, the release said.
Uthmeier's office over the past several months has arrested or issued warrants for nine petition circulators and "anticipates additional arrests in the coming weeks," the release said. The subpoenas seek to determine "whether criminal liability extends beyond individual circulators and into broader organizational conduct."
Smart & Safe Florida said it has reported petition discrepancies to Byrd's office, as required by state law, and flags the petitions before handing them over to county supervisors.
"In short, it appears the attorney general is taking issue with the fact that we explicitly follow the law," Smart & Safe Florida said when asked about the subpoenas. "We will, of course, continue to work with the state to ensure anyone who appears to be committing fraud is immediately terminated and promptly reported to the state and we hope the attorney general applies the same vigor to the $10 million Hope Florida scandal also being investigated by the state attorney."
Meanwhile, lawyers in Uthmeier's office are urging the Florida Supreme Court to find that the proposed constitutional amendment does not meet requirements for placement on the November ballot. The court, which reviews proposed ballot wording, will hear arguments in the case on Feb. 5.