Politics
Florida Marijuana Campaign Fails To Qualify Legalization Initiative For November Ballot, State Officials Say
A Florida campaign has fallen short of collecting enough valid signatures to qualify a marijuana legalization initiative for placement on the November ballot, state officials have announced—though the campaign itself says that determination is “premature.”
Following an aggressive opposition effort marked by litigation, signature invalidations and even criminal investigations led by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) administration, the Florida Department of State announced on Sunday that the cannabis campaign “failed to meet the requirements of Florida law for placement on the 2026 General Election ballot.”
But Smart & Safe Florida, the campaign behind the marijuana initiative, said it believes it actually submitted enough signatures to qualify.
“We believe the declaration by the Secretary of State is premature, as the final and complete county-by-county totals for validated petitions are not yet reported,” a statement first noted by Florida Politics says. “We submitted over 1.4 million signatures and believe when they are all counted, we will have more than enough to make the ballot.”
As of Monday, the state Division of Elections’s website showed 783,592 valid signatures for the measure, but it needed 880,062 validated signatures by Sunday to qualify.
The Department of State said 21 other initiative campaigns also failed to turn in sufficient signatures for ballot access.
Ahead of the signature turn-in, Florida’s attorney general and several business and anti-marijuana groups urged the state Supreme Court to block the cannabis initiative, calling it “fatally flawed” and unconstitutional.
The attorney general’s office had asked the state Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of the legalization initiative. The court accepted the request.
The Florida Chamber of Commerce, Florida Legal Foundation and Judge Frank Shepherd filed a separate joint brief stating that the parties remain “especially vigilant about the abuse of the citizen initiative process by out-of-state interests that think of Florida as just another market and the citizen initiative process as just another means of exploiting that market.”
The Florida Chamber of Commerce has consistently opposed attempts to move forward with adult-use legalization, even as its own polling has shown majority support for the reform.
The briefs were filed days after Smart and Safe Florida filed a lawsuit against state officials, alleging that they improperly directed the invalidation of about 71,000 signatures as the turn-in deadline approached.
The campaign fought several legal battles this cycle to ensure that its initiative is able to qualify for ballot placement.
One of the more recent lawsuits, filed in the Leon County circuit court, claimed Secretary of State Cord Byrd (R) directed county election officials to invalidate about 42,000 signatures from so-called “inactive” voters and roughly 29,000 signatures collected by out-of-state petitioners.
That came after another court upheld a previous decision to strike about 200,000 signatures that the state said were invalid because the petitions didn’t include the full text of the proposed initiative. The campaign contested the legal interpretation, but it declined to appeal the decision based on their confidence they’d collected enough signatures to make up the difference.
Earlier this month, the state attorney general’s office opened dozens of criminal investigations and submitted subpoenas requesting records from Smart & Safe Florida and its contractors and subcontractors over alleged fraud related to the petitioning effort.
Activists said in November that they’d collected more than one million signatures to put the cannabis measure on the ballot, but it’s also challenged officials at the state Supreme Court level over delays the certification process, arguing that the review of the ballot content and summary should have moving forward months ago when it reached an initial signature threshold. The state then agreed to move forward with the processing.
DeSantis campaigned heavily against an earlier version of the legalization proposal, which received a majority of voters in 2024 but not enough to meet the 60 percent threshold required to pass a constitutional amendment. Former Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) unsuccessfully contested the prior initiative in the courts.
In March, meanwhile, two Democratic members of Congress representing Florida asked the federal government to investigate what they described as “potentially unlawful diversion” of millions in state Medicaid funds via a group with ties to DeSantis. The money was used to fight against a citizen ballot initiative, vehemently opposed by the governor, that would have legalized marijuana for adults.
The lawmakers’ letter followed allegations that a $10 million donation from a state legal settlement was improperly made to the Hope Florida Foundation, which later sent the money to two political nonprofits, which in turn sent $8.5 million to a campaign opposing Amendment 3.
The governor said last February that the newest marijuana legalization measure is in “big time trouble” with the state Supreme Court, predicting it would be blocked from going before voters this year.
“There’s a lot of different perspectives on on marijuana,” DeSantis said. “It should not be in our Constitution. If you feel strongly about it, you have elections for the legislature. Go back candidates that you believe will be able to deliver what your vision is on that.”
“But when you put these things in the Constitution—and I think, I mean, the way they wrote, there’s all kinds of things going on in here. I think it’s going to have big time trouble getting through the Florida Supreme Court,” he said.
The latest initiative was filed with the secretary of state’s office just months after the initial version failed during the November 2024 election—despite an endorsement from President Donald Trump.
Smart & Safe Florida is hoping the revised version will succeed in 2026. The campaign—which in the last election cycle received tens of millions of dollars from cannabis industry stakeholders, principally the multi-state operator Trulieve—incorporated certain changes into the new version that seem responsive to criticism opponents raised during the 2024 push.
For example, it now specifically states that the “smoking and vaping of marijuana in any public place is prohibited.”Another section asserts that the legislature would need to approve rules dealing with the “regulation of the time, place, and manner of the public consumption of marijuana.”
In 2023, the governor accurately predicted that the 2024 cannabis measure from the campaign would survive a legal challenge from the state attorney general. It’s not entirely clear why he feels this version would face a different outcome.
While there’s uncertainty around how the state’s highest court will navigate the measure, a poll released last February showed overwhelming bipartisan voter support for the reform—with 67 percent of Florida voters backing legalization, including 82 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans.
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In the background, a recent poll from a Trump-affiliated research firm found that nearly 9 in 10 Florida voters say they should have the right to decide to legalize marijuana in the state.
Meanwhile, Florida lawmakers recently approved a bill to significantly reduce the fee for military veterans to obtain medical marijuana registry identification cards, slashing the cost to one-fifth of the current amount.
The subcommittee vote on the fee reduction bill came about a week after the Senate Regulated Industries Committee advanced separate legislation to ban smoking or vaping marijuana in public places. Rep. Alex Andrade (R) is sponsoring a similar bill to ban public cannabis smoking in the House of Representatives.
Here’s an overview of other pending Florida marijuana bills:
- A House lawmaker is sponsoring a bill to legalize recreational marijuana that also aims to break up what he calls “monopolies” in the state’s current medical cannabis program by revising the business licensing structure.
- Another representative’s bill would protect the parental rights of medical cannabis patients, preventing them from losing custody of their children for using their medicine in accordance with state law.
- Other lawmakers are sponsoring legislation to expand the state’s medical marijuana program, in part by increasing supply limits for patients and waiving registration fees for honorably discharged military veterans. The proposals would also allow doctors to recommend cannabis to any patient who has a condition for which they have been prescribed opioids.
- A senator is sponsoring a bill to legalize home cultivation of marijuana for registered medical cannabis patients in the state.
Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.
