A state agency under control of Gov. Ron DeSantis has issued 11th-hour instructions for verifying petition signatures that could hamper efforts to get a referendum to legalize recreational marijuana on the 2026 Florida ballot.
DeSantis does not want recreational marijuana legalized in Florida. He was the most prominent opponent of a similar 2024 referendum, which failed.
Last week, the Secretary of State’s Office — which is run by a DeSantis appointee — issued a directive to the state’s 67 county supervisors of elections that changed the process for signature verification. It gives instructions that several supervisors of elections said aren’t backed up by state statute or case law established by previous court decisions.
The directive included a final sentence that grabbed the attention of its recipients: “Please note that the Attorney General’s Office is copied on this email.”
The instructions to the supervisors, who are elected by voters in each county to run elections, came from Maria Matthews, director of the state Division of Elections, which is a unit of the Secretary of State’s Office. It was obtained through public records requests to two supervisors’ offices.
It was the latest in a series of moves by the Secretary of State’s Office that could have the effect of reducing the number of verified petition signatures. Getting a proposed amendment to the state Constitution before Florida voters — the mechanism that would legalize recreational marijuana — involved detailed rules about gathering and verifying signatures. County supervisors’ offices do the signature verification work.
The latest change in policy comes at a critical time. Matthews told supervisors what she wanted them to do via an email that went out late in the day on Jan. 8, just weeks before the deadline for sponsors of the proposed marijuana amendment to have sufficient signatures verified to get on the ballot.
If it gets on the ballot, the proposed amendment would legalize recreational marijuana for people 21 and older.
A similar referendum in 2024 got majority support — 55.9% yes; 44.1% no — but failed because it didn’t reach the 60% threshold required for passage. The most prominent Floridia voter, President Donald Trump, said at the time he would vote yes.
Same day
The Republican-controlled Legislature and DeSantis last year made a number of changes to put additional restrictions on the ballot-initiative process.
As of Oct. 1, state law now requires supervisors of elections to send a letter to each person whose signature on a referendum petition is verified. It notifies the voter that their signature has been verified. The mailing must also include a pre-addressed postage-paid form that a voter can use to alert the DeSantis-controlled Office of Election Crimes and Security in Tallahassee if they believe their signature was obtained fraudulently.
In her Jan. 8 email, Matthews cited the state law and cited the part of the new law that requires them to send the notices that specifies “the supervisor shall, as soon as practicable, notify the voter.” Matthews added something that isn’t in the law: that the phrase as soon as practicable “means on the same day you verified the signature as valid.”
Several supervisors of elections said they would follow the law — and that there is nothing in the law that suggests “as soon as practicable” means what Matthews said it means.
“The statute says as soon as practicable. It doesn’t say ‘same day.’ The Division (of Elections) has alerted us that their interpretation of that is it means same day,” said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link.
Link, who is also president of Florida Supervisors of Elections, the professional association of the state’s 67 elected county supervisors, said Palm Beach County would mail the offices the same day or the next day. “I believe we’re in compliance with the statute. Because I think doing it the next business day is ‘as soon as practicable.’”
She said the discussion about the issue among supervisors “has been trying to find anywhere in case law where ‘as soon as practicable’ is ‘same day.’ We, and I believe other supervisors, are doing everything we can to be in compliance with the statute. But sometimes ‘same day’ is not ‘practicable.’”
Link, a lawyer, was a Republican when DeSantis appointed her supervisor of elections in 2019. She later became a Democrat and has since been elected twice to the job by the county’s voters.
Broward Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott, like Link, said his office is “regularly, sometimes two times a day, pushing out the letters. We are doing our best to comply with everything that we are being asked to do.”
Scott, a Democrat, said that means “we are sending out the notifications as quickly as possible. The earliest available sending it out was really what her (Matthews’) intention was. That’s what we’re assuming she expects from us, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Alan Hays, the Lake County supervisor of elections and a former Republican state senator and state representative, said he had changed the procedures in his office, and like Link and Scott said he would follow the law.
But he replied to Matthews’ email by asking her to “please guide me to the source of the definition of the term ‘as soon as practicable’, meaning the same day we verified the validity of the signature?… I have NEVER known the term ‘as soon as practicable’ to mean or imply the same day as an action is completed.”
Hays said his email was acknowledged but his questions weren’t answered.
“I never expected a phrase ‘as soon as practicable’ to mean to do it immediately or do it the same day,” Hays said. “I’m going to comply with it. We take our instructions from the Division of Elections, and we comply with them the best way we can.”
In Broward and Palm Beach counties, two of the most populous counties in the state, people assigned to petition verification sometimes work from early morning until the evening, depending on how many petitions arrive at a supervisor’s office on any given day.
“We basically have to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week to get these petitions done by the deadline,” Scott said.
If the letters to voters must go out the same day the petition is verified, that would mean in some cases stopping work on verification so the notices could be prepared and delivered to the Postal Service. Under the same-day procedure mandated by Matthews, the work couldn’t resume until the next day, when verifications might again have to stop in order to get the notices to voters prepared and mailed.
Unaddressed in the directive are the implications for the period just before the verification deadline of Feb. 1, which is a Sunday. Supervisors said that it was unclear what the Elections Division envisioned them doing on Jan. 31.
A spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s office didn’t respond to questions about the directive about the timing of mailings to petition-signers.
Attorney general
Among the unanswered questions was why supervisors were told the emailed instructions to them were being copied to the Attorney General’s Office.
The Secretary of State’s Office directive was copied to David Dewhirst, chief of staff to Attorney General James Uthmeier.
Uthmeier was appointed attorney general by DeSantis last year after serving as the governor’s chief of staff and campaign manager for DeSantis’ unsuccessful candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
While he was DeSantis’ top aide, he was a central player in the effort that ended up in defeat of the 2024 marijuana referendum.
In his current official role as attorney general, Uthmeier has urged the Florida Supreme Court to not allow the 2026 marijuana referendum on the ballot.
The Supreme Court is involved because it is responsible for approving the proposed ballot measure, reviewing issues whether proposed constitutional amendments are limited to single subjects and whether the proposed ballot language is clear.
Other efforts
The directive on the timing of the petition verification notice comes after several other actions by the Secretary of State’s Office that threaten to keep the proposed marijuana legalization amendment off the 2026 ballot.
Inactive voters: The state on Dec. 23 ordered supervisors to invalidate petitions signed by inactive voters.
Voters get moved to inactive status if mail sent to them is undelivered and their addresses aren’t confirmed. They are still registered to vote and may become active again by simply showing up to vote or doing something such as requesting a vote-by-mail ballot. Inactive voters who don’t vote in two general elections, or take another action to become active, can be removed from the rolls of registered voters.
But the Secretary of State’s Office decided last year their signatures couldn’t be used for petitions, a move that has required elections offices to go back and remove previously verified petitions signed by inactive voters, a process that is still ongoing, Link said.
Out-of-state circulators: Rejecting petitions that were obtained by non-Florida residents working as solicitors. State law was changed to ban out-of-state people from gathering petitions. While a since-overturned court order was in place, petitions were accepted from non-resident circulators. Those verified petitions are now being removed.
The rejection of inactive voters’ signatures that were previously allowed and the rejection of petitions circulated by out of staters are the subject of litigation between the state and Safe & Smart Florida, which is spearheading the petition drive.
“It is clear that the Secretary (of State) is using every means necessary to stifle the voices of over a million Florida voters who have lawfully and legally signed petitions,” a spokesperson for Smart & Safe Florida said in a written statement.
“From the month’s-long delay in sending the ballot language to the (state Supreme) Court to the after-the-fact nullifying of valid petitions, it seems there is nothing that will stop the administration from preventing these voters from having their say,” Smart & Safe said.
A spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s office said the state is working to combat fraud, including by revoking the legal permission “for petition gathers who have engaged in fraud, and the Office of Election Crimes and Security is performing audits to ensure all signatures are legitimate and gathered in accordance with state laws. In the last three months, ECS has received more than 1,700 complaints from voters reporting their signatures have been forged or misrepresented on the petitions.”
Matthews’ boss, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, is a former Republican state legislator appointed to his current job by DeSantis. The supervisors of elections declined to ascribe motives to actions by the Secretary of State’s Office.
In his email reply to the elections division chief Hays wrote: “I have been and shall continue to strive to comply with the law but the rules changing so frequently as is being done in this petition 25-01 issue makes it difficult for me to know if I’m complying or not.” Petition 25-01 is the marijuana initiative.
Petition verification
Verifying petitions involves multiple steps, including the new notice requirement to signers.
Elections offices first count the number of signed petitions turned in. The petitions must be accompanied by a payment to cover the cost of verification, unless the sponsor already has deposited funds to do so.
Petitions are then scanned into the system, Link said. Identification for the signer (driver’s license, state ID or last four digits of their Social Security number) is checked.
Once scanned, Link said someone who has received signature training pulls up the image of the petition and the voter record showing the original signature.
Before the verification is finalized, each signature is reviewed again by another person.
Scott, Link and Hays said the volume varies dramatically. “Some days you may get four boxes (of petitions). Other days you may get none,” Hays said. Link said her office may get a few hundred petitions one day and 1,800 the next.
“We’re processing all day,” Link said.
Outlook
The fate of the referendum effort is unclear.
Smart & Safe Florida has to submit at least 880,062 valid petitions by Feb. 1.
The status of the effort is unknown since the Division of Elections does not appear to continuously update the total number of verified petitions.
It showed 675,307 verified petitions Thursday afternoon — a figure that hasn’t been updated in weeks.
Instructions from the Division of Elections can make a difference: 42,000 petitions signed by inactive voters and nearly 29,000 petitions collected by out-of-staters are being removed.
Smart & Safe Florida said last week more than 1 million voters had signed petitions for the proposal.
The organization spent almost $53 million on the referendum effort last year. State filings show the medical marijuana company Trulieve provided almost all the money.
This report includes information from the News Service of Florida.
Political writer Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.