TALLAHASSEE — With Democrats calling the changes an “assault on the very spirit of Florida’s democracy,” the Republican-controlled Legislature on Friday finalized a plan that will impose additional hurdles on the ballot-initiative process and heighten penalties for wrongdoing.
Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed lawmakers to crack down on the process after highly contentious and expensive battles over proposals last year that sought to place abortion rights in the state Constitution and allow recreational marijuana for adults.
The governor helped lead campaigns to defeat the proposed constitutional amendments, which fell short of receiving the necessary 60 percent approval to pass.
Supporters of the bill (HB 1205), which is headed to DeSantis, relied heavily on a voluminous report by the state Office of Elections Crimes and Security that found dozens of instances of wrongdoing by petition-signature gatherers.
“We’re doing this because we want to reduce the bad actions, we want to reduce the fraud, we want to reduce the opportunities for people to pervert the system,” Senate sponsor Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican and former Senate president, said.
The bill is the latest move in years of efforts by Republican lawmakers, backed by business groups such as the Florida Chamber of Commerce, to make it more difficult to place citizen initiatives on the ballot. They argue, in part, that policy decisions should be made by the Legislature instead of through ballot initiatives.
The Senate voted 28-9 to pass the measure, which was approved Thursday by the House in an 81-30 vote. The votes came after sponsors made tweaks this week to earlier versions of the bill, with the Senate giving final approval just hours before the legislative session was scheduled to end.
One controversial part of the bill would require the Office of Elections Crimes and Security to investigate if 25 percent of submitted petitions for a ballot initiative during any reporting period are deemed invalid. Supporters of proposed constitutional amendments often submit more signatures than are needed to get on the ballot, with the expectation that some will be rejected.
Critics argued that the validity threshold would have triggered investigations for all of the ballot proposals that have passed in recent years.
The bill also would impose hefty fines for sponsors of ballot initiatives for wrongdoing by petition gatherers, such as signing other people’s names or leaving information blank on petitions. Each violation would carry a $5,000 fine, but sponsors could avoid financial penalties if they discover violations of signature-gathering laws and report them “as soon as practicable” to the secretary of state’s office.
Another controversial part of the plan would impose new restrictions on signature gathering.
Only Florida residents who are U.S. citizens and who have not been convicted of felonies or have had their right to vote restored would be allowed to register with the state to collect signatures.
The measure also would cap how many completed petitions unregistered signature-gatherers could possess and make violations of the restriction a felony. Unregistered people would be allowed to possess petitions for themselves, 25 other people and certain family members.
Petitions collected by ineligible people or unregistered individuals who violate the 25-petition cap would not be counted toward the number of signatures required for ballot placement.
“What we are debating today is not just a bill. It’s a barricade. A deliberate wall erected between the people of Florida and the power of their own voices,” Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis, D-Ocoee, argued before the House vote Thursday. “This is an assault on the very spirit of Florida’s democracy.”
The bill also would require supervisors of elections to notify voters who signed validated petitions and inform them of their right to revoke their signatures, a provision that critics said is meant to encourage voters to withdraw their signatures and would drive up costs.
Critics of the legislation argued that the plan would erect unnecessary hurdles to what many said was one of the nation’s most onerous petition processes.
Sen. Tina Polsky, D-Boca Raton, said the Republican-led Legislature has established “a pattern” of changing election-related laws “if the majority doesn’t like what they see in a prior election.”
“We raise the bar,” Polsky said.
She pointed to last year’s election and the battles over Amendment 3, which would have allowed recreational marijuana, and the abortion-rights measure, which appeared on the ballot as Amendment 4. Both received support from more than 50 percent of voters but did not meet the 60 percent threshold.
“Those pesky amendments 3 and 4 just came too damn close to passing. So what are we going to do? We're going to make sure that doesn't happen again. We're going to make it so hard and so expensive that only corporate interests are going to be able to ever get a citizens initiative on the ballot,” Polsky said.
Brad Ashwell, Florida state director for the advocacy group All Voting is Local Action, called the bill “a death blow” to the initiative process.
“it's a direct assault on the citizen-led amendment process. It completely removes volunteers from the process, who have better validation rates and really get at the heart of the civic engagement value the initiative process has,” Ashwell said this week.
Voting-rights groups are expected to challenge parts of the bill in court.
But Mark Wilson, president of the Florida Chamber of Commerce, issued a statement Friday that described the bill as “a much-needed step in the right direction.”
“For decades, the Florida Chamber has led the effort to safeguard our state’s foundational document because Floridians and local businesses across our state deserve a Constitution that provides certainty and stability, not one that is up for sale every two years,” Wilson said.
The plan includes a provision, sponsored by Sen. Jennifer Bradley, R-Fleming Island, that would prohibit the use of state funds to advocate for or against proposed constitutional amendments, a restriction that targets DeSantis’ use of state agencies to combat the abortion and marijuana initiatives last year.
Bradley said the bill isn’t aimed at restricting voters’ participation in the democratic process.
The bill “does not address imaginary, hypothetical fraud, but known fraud,” Bradley said and “strikes a balance” to ensure integrity in the initiative process.
“An important and necessary piece of this bill is that when citizens navigate that process and they do it right and they comply with all the requirements that they are not then going to face the unlimited coffers of state government to fight against them. That is not right,” Bradley said.