TALLAHASSEE—With just a day left in a meandering Session, the Florida Senate is forcing the House into limited options on a bill overhauling the petition process: consider the Senate version, try to push their own version through, or buck the governor and let the measure die.
If lawmakers can’t agree by midnight tomorrow—the final day of the 60-day legislative session—on SB 7016, a sweeping overhaul of the ballot amendment process, the Gov. Ron DeSantis priority bill will die.
The clock is ticking.
"The right of citizens to petition, the most basic grassroots right in a free society, has been corrupted," said bill sponsor Sen. Don Gaetz, a Republican. "Not by citizens, but by out-of-state contractors and their paid petition circulators and millions and millions of dollars."
DeSantis demanded a petition process revamp in the months following the November elections, in which two proposed constitutional amendments expanding marijuana and abortion access nearly passed. Both sponsors of the ballot initiatives, called Amendments 3 and 4, have since been branded with heavy fines for alleged identity theft, petition fraud, and election violations.
Democrats say the DeSantis priority bill should die because they believe it will remove the power of the people to petition for constitutional amendments.
"This bill doesn't raise the bar...it puts the bar out of reach and then tells Floridians to jump anyways," said Democrat Sen. Shevrin Jones.
The debate on the petition bill comes a day after the boiling relations between the two chambers spilled out from behind closed doors and into the public view. The House and Senate, which have not been able to agree on a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, engaged in a nasty back-and-forth Wednesday because the lower chamber took a substance abuse center named after a 27-year-sober Senator out of a mental health bill.
SB 7106 passed the Senate Floor Thursday in an X-X vote, weeks after the House already passed its own version—with significant differences. It will now head back to the House for Representatives to either accept the Senate version, amend it to be like their original version, or do nothing and let it die.
What Are the Differences?
The House version, sponsored by Republican Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, imposes 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.
It also removes the state’s chief economist from voting on a ballot amendment’s financial impact, requires all petition circulators to undergo a criminal background check, and allows the Legislature to create definitions for terms petition sponsors left undefined.
The Senate has none of those provisions.
Unlike the House, the Senate version requires volunteers who collect their own petition, their immediate family’s, and five others to register as a petition circulator. If they don’t, violators face a third-degree felony.
It also requires the estimated financial impact of the amendment to be on the petition, changing the current law that places the statement on the ballot.
Both force 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%.
