Florida Officials Block Cannabis Initiative Review Despite Triple the Required Signatures | Cannabis Law Report | How to buy Skittles Moonrock online

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Policy Decoded have reported the following

What Happened: Smart & Safe Florida filed its second lawsuit in two weeks after Secretary of State Cord Byrd refused for over three months to issue a statutorily required confirmation letter despite the campaign collecting 662,543 verified signatures when only 220,016 are needed to trigger Attorney General and Supreme Court review. The October 30th Supreme Court mandamus petition argues Florida law requires Byrd’s office to “immediately submit” initiatives once they reach 25% of required signatures in at least half of congressional districts, yet the Division of Elections has provided no response despite meeting all statutory requirements last summer. The new lawsuit follows an October 19th state court challenge over Division of Elections Director Maria Matthews directing county supervisors to invalidate approximately 200,000 already-verified signatures because Smart & Safe allegedly didn’t provide full amendment text with mail petitions, even though the campaign voluntarily complied with Byrd’s March guidance six months before any legal requirement existed. Byrd’s refusal creates a procedural death spiral where the April 1st Supreme Court review deadline approaches but Attorney General James Uthmeier cannot petition the Court until receiving Byrd’s confirmation letter, effectively killing the measure through administrative paralysis regardless of signature totals. The obstruction operates against the backdrop of a new ballot law, which DeSantis signed in May 2025 after Amendment 3 received 56% voter support, imposing $1 million bond requirements once campaigns hit 25% of signatures, cutting petition submission deadlines from 30 to 10 days, making it a felony to possess more than 25 petitions without registering as a circulator, and banning non-Florida residents from signature gathering entirely. Power to the people, though…

Why It Matters: The dual obstruction tactics show what happens when a governor who successfully defeated an initiative at the ballot box (by losing the popular vote, though) controls every qualification checkpoint for the rematch and appoints the exact officials who ran his opposition campaign to administer the process. Florida law clearly uses the word “immediately” to describe the Secretary’s duty once 25% thresholds are met, leaving zero discretion, yet Byrd told POLITICO in October he hadn’t received “official notice” from his own Division of Elections despite the state’s publicly available database showing 662,543 verified signatures. The signature invalidation is particularly problematic because Smart & Safe voluntarily improved their petition disclosure after the Secretary’s March guidance, adding full amendment text before any legal requirement existed. Matthews then waited until October to order invalidation of signatures collected throughout 2024 under rules the campaign was following at the time. That retroactive enforcement weaponizes the campaign’s good-faith compliance against them. Federal courts have established that retroactive invalidation of ballots cast in officially-endorsed manner amounts to constitutional violation, and the Fourth Circuit recognized in Hendon v. North Carolina State Board of Elections that intentional retroactive invalidation erodes the democratic process. Uthmeier’s conflicts run deep as DeSantis’ former chief of staff who chaired Keep Florida Clean, which raised over $1 million to defeat Amendment 3 in 2024, and now serves as Attorney General tasked with objectively reviewing the 2026 version. The timeline matters because Supreme Court review typically takes months. The 2024 review began in November 2023 and the Court didn’t issue its decision until April 1, 2024. Smart & Safe crossed signature thresholds last summer but still hasn’t triggered the statutory review process.