The Florida Senate targets the ballot initiative process

By Jim Saunders ©2025 The News Service of Florida

TALLAHASSEE — A day after the Florida House started moving forward with its version of the plan, the Senate on Friday released a wide-ranging bill that would add restrictions to the state’s ballot initiative process.

The Senate Ethics and Elections Committee on Monday will consider the bill, which, among other things, would place new requirements on petition gathering and open the door to legal challenges after constitutional amendments pass.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has made a priority of trying to restrict the initiative process after he successfully led efforts last year to defeat proposed constitutional amendments on abortion rights and recreational marijuana. DeSantis and other Republicans contend changes are needed to combat fraud in the process, particularly in the collection of petition signatures needed to put measures on the ballot.

“Amending Florida’s Constitution is a responsibility every voter takes very seriously, and petition integrity is critical to ensuring the effectiveness of the citizen initiative process,” Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, said in a statement Friday as the Senate released its bill (SPB 7016). “This legislation increases transparency and accountability for sponsors of initiatives; deters, prevents, and penalizes fraudulent activities; and, provides voters with objective information about financial impacts of proposed amendments at the front end of the process.”

But efforts to restrict the process are drawing criticism from Democrats and other opponents, who say voters need to be able to pass ballot initiatives when the Legislature ignores their wishes. They point to a series of initiatives that have passed on issues such as raising the minimum wage, allowing medical marijuana, starting the state’s voluntary pre-kindergarten program and seeking to prevent political gerrymandering.

Opponents on Thursday jammed a committee room as the House Government Operations Subcommittee gave an initial approval to the House version (HB 1205).

“Let’s be clear, this bill is not about election integrity,” Genesis Robinson, executive director for the voting-rights group Equal Ground Education Fund and Action Fund, told the House panel. “It’s about fear, fear of the people using their constitutional right to act when you fail to deliver on the issues that matter most to them. House Bill 1205 would make the citizen-initiative process nearly impossible.”

The Senate and House bills share some proposed changes. As examples, they would require that signed petition forms include voters’ driver’s license or Florida identification card numbers or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers; reduce from 30 days to 10 days the deadline for initiative sponsors to submit petitions to elections supervisors for verification; and increase fines for petitions that are submitted late.

But the 49-page Senate bill, which will be headed by Ethics and Elections Chairman Don Gaetz, R-Niceville, and Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, would go further than the House proposal in some ways.

For instance, it would require volunteer petition gatherers — not just paid circulators, as is the case now — to register with the state.

Also, it would tweak a law to make clear that voters could go to circuit court to challenge the approval of constitutional amendments. A Senate overview of the bill said the current law does not “specifically contemplate” such challenges.

“The bill clarifies grounds for contesting the results of a constitutional amendment should be the same as contesting the results of a candidate election,” the overview said. “As such, the bill specifically includes grounds for contesting the results for a constitutional amendment at the state level, including ineligibility of the proposed constitutional amendment for placement on the ballot.”

Also, for instance, the Senate bill would make changes related to what are known as “financial impact” statements that appear on the ballot with proposed constitutional amendments. Financial impact statements, which are issued by a panel known as the Financial Impact Estimating Conference, provide estimated effects of proposed constitutional amendments on government revenues and the state budget.

Under current law, the secretary of state sends initiatives to the Financial Impact Estimating Conference for analysis when the initiatives’ sponsors have collected 25 percent of the required number of signatures to get on the ballot. But under the Senate bill, a financial-impact statement would have to be approved before voters could start signing petitions — a requirement that could delay the start of petition gathering.

The Senate overview said the change would “provide voters considering signing a petition an idea of the impact of the amendment before signing.”

Petition gathering and submission is a time-consuming and expensive process.To place initiatives on the 2024 ballot, sponsors needed to submit 891,523 petition signatures statewide and also meet signature requirements in congressional districts.

State Republican leaders, with support from groups such as the Florida Chamber of Commerce, have taken a series of steps during the past two decades aimed at making it harder to place initiatives on the ballot and pass them. But the issue was refueled last year amid the fights about proposals that would have enshrined abortion rights in the state Constitution and allowed recreational use of marijuana.

The abortion initiative in November received support from 57.2 percent of voters, while the recreational-marijuana measure received support from 55.9 percent. They fell short of the 60 percent approval needed to pass constitutional amendments.