After defeating abortion and marijuana amendments, DeSantis wants less power for voters | Opinion

In the past decade, Florida voters have protected natural lands and water, restored voting rights for some felons, approved medical marijuana, raised the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour and overwhelmingly gave themselves the exclusive right to expand casino gambling.

All of these measures were put on the ballot and approved thanks to Florida’s citizen initiative process, which has existed since 1968. By the time these state constitutional amendments appeared before voters, their proponents had gathered hundreds of thousands of petition signatures and met a slew state rules that have become more stringent over the years, and the wording of the ballot item had undergone a review by the Florida Supreme Court. And the measures only went into effect after being approved by at least 60% of voters.

In other words, these “citizen initiatives” are difficult, expensive propositions that can only be carried out by well-financed groups.

Now, Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to make amending the constitution essentially impossible for citizens or private groups. Of course, the governor and the Legislature would retain their power to put constitutional amendments on the ballot; it’s the people who would be practically barred from pitching their own policy changes, which often conflict with the will of state officials. Citing petition fraud, DeSantis proposed reforms he wants the Legislature to approve in a special session starting Monday.

DeSantis’ longterm goal seems to be to prevent another round of ballot initiatives to legalize abortion rights and recreational marijuana, both of which failed by small margins in last year’s election. Last week, proponents of the marijuana amendment filed a revamped and improved proposal meant to appear on the 2026 ballot.

If lawmakers follow DeSantis’ lead — and it’s unclear if they will after, in a rare move, they publicly pushed back against a special session — the state would overhaul how amendment sponsors can collect petitions to get initiatives on the ballot.

Instead of hiring third-party organizations to gather signatures outside grocery stores and other public spaces, Florida would require voters who want to sign a petition to appear in person at an elections office, or request a petition in a process similar to vote-by-mail. In last year’s elections, each amendment proposal needed about 891,000 petition signatures to make it on the ballot so getting to that number would be a fool’s errand if the governor gets his way.

DeSantis also wants to make it a third-degree felony for someone to collect more than two signed petition forms for the same initiative besides their own and a family member’s. He also appears to be specifically targeting any future abortion rights initiatives by requiring the Florida Supreme Court to evaluate a petition for compliance with Article 1, Section 2 of the constitution, which deals with Floridians’ rights to life, liberty and happiness. When Amendment 4 — to allow abortions up until viability — went before the Court last year, some conservative justices questioned if unborn children were protected by that constitutional provision.

DeSantis pulled out all the stops to prevent Amendment 4 from succeeding, including using taxpayer resources to campaign against it. His administration also launched an investigation into the amendment’s petition gathering process that he’s now using as justification for the new laws he wants to implement.

A state report stated there was “widespread petition fraud” in the gathering of Amendment 4 petition signatures, and estimated that 16.4% of petitions across the state shouldn’t have been validated. However, the report didn’t provide data to backup some of its generalizations about the petition drive, the Herald/Times Tallahassee Bureau reported. The report says that election supervisors referred “an unusually high volume of complaints” to the state, but doesn’t compare it to the number of complaints about any other measure, for example.

The DeSantis administration’s willingness to investigate Amendment 4 seems odd since it raised relatively few red flags until his elections police got involved. Contrast that with the fizzling of another investigation into petitions gathered by casino giant Las Vegas Sands to expand gaming in Florida in 2022, despite some describing it as the most egregious example of petition fraud in recent history, the Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau reported.

The difference might have been that the Las Vegas Sands was founded by the late Sheldon Adelson, who backed DeSantis in the 2018 election.

Rooting out fraud is a noble goal, but that should not be used selectively, or as a cover to silence voters’ voice on the ballot.

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