If you recently attended a big public event, you may have been approached by someone gathering signatures to put recreational marijuana back on Florida’s ballot in 2026.
Clipboard-toting signature-gatherers have been out in force. This is direct democracy at work, and many voters signed despite new requirements to provide significant personal information, such as a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number — steps designed to discourage them from signing.
Many voters may recall that this issue was on the ballot in 2024 as Amendment 3, when it fell short of the 60% needed for passage.
What they may not have known is that Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state officials used a legally dubious diversion of money through a charity supported by First Lady Casey DeSantis to defeat the amendment. A grand jury in Tallahassee is investigating that diversion of $10 million.
The current DeSantis strategy, according to lawsuits by Smart & Safe Florida, the group working to return recreational pot to the ballot, seems to be that the best election is the one that never happens — the rights of voters be damned.
Ignoring the rules
In its lawsuit, Smart & Safe Florida accuses Secretary of State Cord Byrd of purposefully ignoring the fact that the organization has turned in hundreds of thousands of signed petitions to elections supervisors across the state.
Of the 880,062 signatures required for ballot access, the group has submitted more than 676,000 and will almost certainly meet the final goal by its February deadline.
After 25% of the required petitions are filed, or about 220,000 signatures, Byrd is supposed to submit the ballot language to the Florida Supreme Court for a legal review.
It has been three months since that threshold was met, and Byrd hasn’t done that. In fact, he has done nothing, other than issue a directive to county election supervisors that as many as 200,000 valid signatures should be rejected.
That decision is the subject of the first lawsuit, filed in mid-October: Byrd has ruled that because some petitions sent by mail (using a form that had been approved by state elections officials) did not include the full text of the proposed amendment, they should be invalidated.
The fine print
But those petition mailings did include an easy-to-type web address that could be used to view the full text. State law does not require the full text to be printed with every petition, the lawsuit argues.
The lawsuit also says that signatures submitted before the 2025 legislative session should not be subject to a new law, signed by DeSantis in the spring, that requires petition sponsors to show voters a fiscal impact statement along with the full language of the proposed amendment when requesting signatures.
That bill (HB 1205) was signed by DeSantis on May 2, the last scheduled day of the regular session, which was extended for several weeks.
If Byrd and DeSantis are right, the Legislature could thwart any ballot amendment by retroactively changing the rules to invalidate petitions. That’s not fair.
More political scheming
The intent is clear: DeSantis and Byrd are scheming to keep voters from having a second chance to approve recreational marijuana, even after they’ve cleared all the barriers lawmakers have put in place to keep proposed amendments from reaching the ballot.
This is a blatant attack on grassroots democracy. With the grand jury looking over his shoulder, DeSantis should know better.
Stripping the validity from signatures is an ugly maneuver, but it’s one that Smart & Safe can overcome by frantically gathering enough extra signatures to make up for those unfairly thrown away.
DeSantis and Byrd seem to believe they can kill the initiative by simply ignoring their legal and constitutional duties until the clock runs out.
It’s on the Supreme Court to order the governor and secretary to stop stalling and send justices the ballot language so they can ensure that it’s legally sufficient and honest with voters about its impact if it passes. The state’s high court is likely to approve it, because the 2026 version is even more conservative than the 2024 language that it already approved.
Then it’s up to voters, as it should be, without interference by state leaders who are pushing a political agenda to cancel out voters’ rights.
That should infuriate every Florida voter who values their rights, even those who opposed recreational pot once and and will again — if given the chance.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board includes Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
