The organizers behind an amendment to legalize marijuana in Florida contend that the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis is interfering with their efforts to make the 2026 ballot and they have asked a court to stop it.
Smart & Safe Florida, the political committee sponsoring the amendment and which is largely supported by Trulieve, a medical marijuana company, last week filed a lawsuit over an effort by state election officials to toss out as many as 200,000 signatures for the initiative. They call the actions by Secretary of State Cord Byrd, appointed by DeSantis, “unlawful” and unprecedented.
Smart & Safe needs to collect more than 880,000 signatures to make the ballot. The new lawsuit points out that Maria Matthews, head of the Division Elections, told local supervisors to throw out signed and validated signatures because Smart & Safe Florida did not provide the people it reached out to by mail with a copy of the entire amendment.
Matthew’s edict to toss the signatures came after Byrd in March advised Smart & Safe Florida that the petition it was mailing voters and asking them to return wasn’t valid because it didn’t contain the wording of the amendment.
The group began including the full language following Byrd’s correspondence and also provided Byrd with the names of all those who returned forms to it by mail.
Nevertheless, the suit calls Matthews’ actions unlawful.
“Smart & Safe filed this lawsuit to require the Secretary of State to follow Florida law and to prevent the state from denying the Florida voters who signed the petition to have their voices,” the group said through a spokesperson.
“We are asking the court to enforce Florida law, it’s really that simple. In this matter in an unprecedented directive the Secretary of State’s office ordered all local supervisors of elections to invalidate upwards of 200,000 lawfully gathered petitions that have already been reviewed and certified by the local supervisors. The state is wrongly attempting to change the rules after the fact and deny these registered voters their voice in the process.”
Under Florida law, those seeking to place an initiative on the ballot have until Feb. 1 to gather the signatures they need. The latest figures posted by the Department of State show that organizers have collected more than 662,000 already.
Smart & Safe Florida is the same group that tried unsuccessfully to get pot legalized in 2024 but the amendment fell short of the 60% threshold needed for approval.
The 200,000 tossed signatures may not be the only legal obstacle the new proposed amendment to legalize marijuana is facing.
Politico Florida reports that Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has not sent the proposed amendment to the Florida Supreme Court for review, despite the organizers having collected enough signatures to trigger that action.
Meanwhile, the legal challenge over the second pot amendment coincides with a Leon County grand jury’s probe into a $10 million Medicaid payment made to the Hope Florida Foundation, an initiative spearheaded by First Lady Casey DeSantis designed to help transition people off Medicaid and other social service programs.
Hope Florida subsequently directed the money to two groups that donated millions to the campaign to defeat the 2024 amendment to legalize recreational pot for adults.
