Florida eyes further cracking down on ballot initiative process

Florida lawmakers could once again seek to make it harder for everyday citizens to change the state’s constitution in the wake of a ballot initiative this year that would enshrine access to abortion.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ election security office called for changes to the citizen petition process in a report last week claiming widespread fraud by people who collected signatures to put the measure on the ballot. While the report includes little data to back up many of its claims, it says the office has “a great deal of information” it plans to deploy as legislative proposals in the coming session.

It is “imperative that the state consider major reforms to the initiative petition process to prevent groups from doing this ever again in Florida,” the report said.

More changes to the state’s citizen petition process — made increasingly onerous by lawmakers through the years — could make it all the more difficult. They could also make it harder to revive the abortion initiative if it fails to muster the 60% threshold required for approval.

Backers of Amendment 4 criticized the report released last week as politically motivated and a means to sway the upcoming election. The real aim is to weaken citizens’ voices, they said.

Angelo Paparella, the president of California-based PCI Consultants, who has worked for more than 30 years on ballot initiatives, including Amendment 4, said the state isn’t sincerely interested in any kind of reform to the initiative process. They want to kill it, he said.

Florida is one of a few states that allow its residents to amend the constitution by popular vote. But the process is already a multimillion-dollar endeavor, with a tight timeline and a higher bar for ballot qualification and voter approval than nearly any of the other states that allow it.

“It’s too popular a process for them to just outlaw it,” Paparella said. “So this is just part of their process of a death by a thousand cuts.”

Though the report from the state Election Crimes and Securities office doesn’t specify exactly what its proposals will be, it highlights certain policy points. It notes that in Florida people with felony records can work as petition circulators, that groups hired to collect petitions can be registered out of state and that petition circulators don’t have to reside in the state. The report says that out-of-state residency has made for “significant investigative challenges” in their audit of Amendment 4. It also noted that PCI Consultants being based out of state “hampered” the state’s ability to execute a subpoena.

The state’s report claims that employees circulating petitions committed fraud. In their report, they looked at thousands of signatures local elections supervisors had already deemed valid.

A few years ago, the state also changed the law to require campaigns to turn in all petitions they collect — even ones that the campaign suspects are fraudulent, said Steve Vancore, a political communications expert who has worked on Florida petition campaigns since the 1980s.

“They required all these bad petitions, and now they’re attacking the process for turning in all these bad petitions,” Vancore said.

Representatives from the Florida Senate declined to comment on the state’s report and any proposed reforms, and the Florida House did not return a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of State, which oversees the elections security office, declined to say what the legislative proposals would be, and said “the report speaks for itself.”

State Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, said he hadn’t read the state’s report, but said he already was planning to adjust petition-gathering laws next session. That includes changing it so that instead of the current requirement in the state Constitution to get a certain number of petitions in at least half of Florida’s 28 Congressional Districts, groups have to meet a certain percentage threshold in every county.

He said he thinks groups are using the “larger, more liberal areas of the state” to put issues on the ballot, and he thinks the process is being abused.

”This is just something I feel needs to be changed or cracked down on,” Ingoglia said.

The right for Florida residents to petition for change to the constitution is embedded within that very document. And the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized petition signature gathering as political speech protected under the First Amendment.

Floridians have exercised that right repeatedly to address issues they felt lawmakers have neglected. Lawmakers have repeatedly followed with rules making the process harder.

In the face of recurring citizen initiatives, lawmakers asked voters to approve upping to threshold for passage from a simple majority to 60%. It was approved in 2006 with less than 60% of the vote.

In 2018, Floridians passed an amendment restoring voting rights to people with felony records. Then in 2019, the state overhauled petition circulator requirements, banning workers from being paid per signature. It also required them to register with the state and turn in all petitions within 30 days of being signed, making the process harder.

In 2020, voters approved an amendment supporting a $15 minimum wage, backed by deep-pocketed Florida lawyer John Morgan. In 2021, lawmakers tried to cap contributions to political committees supporting ballot initiatives at $3,000, which a federal judge struck down.

Even with the momentum behind abortion ballot initiatives nationwide, Paparella said the Florida campaign struggled to meet the financial threshold they needed during the collection process.

“When you raise the cost, you lower the access,” he said. “It just increases the cost of doing these campaigns, so perversely, it has the effect of making it more only moneyed interests being able to use the process.”

Changes to the ballot initiative process are happening across the nation. Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, the executive director of the left-leaning Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, said attacks on the initiative process have escalated after a wave of abortion-related victories since 2022.

This year in Arizona for example, there are two proposals on the ballot about changing the state’s initiative process. Arizona also has an abortion-protection measure on the ballot.

In Arkansas, the state’s election officials disqualified an abortion protection ballot measure because they said the sponsor group did not submit required statements regarding paid petition gatherers, which the group denied.

And in Missouri, state lawmakers sued the secretary of state for putting an abortion access measure on the ballot, saying the sponsor group didn’t follow the laws.

“What we’ve seen from our own research is people like this tool,” Figueredo said. “They like the power and agency to put issues on the ballot. They feel like it’s a way to take their power back and provide the opportunity to reimagine democracy when they feel like they aren’t being listened to.”

Times/Herald reporter Lawrence Mower contributed to this report.

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