Florida Senate Advances Ballot Amendment Overhaul—Despite House Differences

TALLAHASSEE—The Florida Senate this week advanced a sweeping change in how petitions to put constitutional amendments on the ballot are handled, prompted by a vicious battle between the state and pro-abortion advocates during the 2024 election.

The 50-page measure, which differs from the version approved on the House Floor last week, hopes to revamp how citizen-led initiatives get onto the ballot. It comes months after Gov. Ron DeSantis led a taxpayer-funded blitz opposing two citizen-led amendments and their sponsors, both of which have paid or been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars over alleged election violations.

“There’s one stain on Florida’s election integrity, and it’s deep, and it’s broad, and it’s ugly,” said Republican Sen. Don Gaetz, who’s sponsoring SB 7016 with Republican Sen. Erin Grall, in the Senate Fiscal Policy Committee.

“Bad actors have undermined and corrupted the right of citizens to amend their own constitution,” Gaetz added.

SB 7016 makes it a third-degree felony for Floridians to collect more than their own petition, those of their immediate family, and two others without registering as a petition circulator. It also requires all petition gatherers to be Florida residents and mandates that a statement estimating the financial impact of the proposed amendment be on the petition.

The legislation was borne from the massive debate between the DeSantis administration and the sponsors of proposed Amendments 3 and 4, which would have legalized recreational marijuana and enshrined abortion access in the state constitution. Along with him and the First Lady hosting 16 statewide events blasting both measures, the governor’s agencies also shelled out millions of taxpayer funds criticizing the two measures.

A preliminary state report later found bulk identity theft and petition fraud from the campaign behind Amendment 4, which had already paid a $164K settlement to the state. More recently, the campaign behind Amendment 3 has been charged a $121K fine for alleged election violations.

How is it Different From the House Version?

One of the main differences between the Senate bill and the House version, sponsored by Republican Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, is the imposition of a $1 million bond for petition sponsors once they’ve collected at least 25% of the total signatures needed to get a measure on the ballot.  

And while this provision was initially in the Senate version, Gaetz said he and Grall struck it on Tuesday because of the “good criticism” they’d received in past committee stops.

“We received good criticism and suggestions about the difficulty of obtaining a $1 million bond,” said Gaetz. “You could say that a $1 million bond could cost as little as $10,000, but that’s if Mr. Rockefeller wanted it.”

The House version does not mandate volunteers who collect a certain number of petitions to register as circulators and does not require the financial estimation to be on the petition. Unlike the House, the Senate does not allow the Legislature to define terms that the sponsors have left undefined and does not strike the state’s chief economist from voting on an amendment’s financial impact.

Both require petition sponsors to turn in petitions within 10 days—down from 30—and insist that the state’s election police automatically conduct an investigation if a certain percentage of petitions are deemed invalid by the county supervisor: the House puts this at 10% while the Senate designates it at 25%.

While the House version passed the Floor last week, SB 7016 passed the Fiscal Policy committee in a party line vote on Tuesday. It will head to the Senate Floor.