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On Friday, May 2, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida demonstrated again, that he, along with many of our Floridian legislators, continue to be terrified of the power of "We, the People." How this time? By approving the most stringent restrictions on our ability to introduce citizen initiatives for amendments to our Constitution.
Right in our Constitution (Article 11, Section 3) it says: "The power to propose the revision or amendment of any portion or portions of this constitution by initiative is reserved to the people." That's a clear statement. It says "we the people" have the right reserved to us, the people, to amend the constitution. And as a group, we citizens have done a pretty good job, introducing things like the Sunshine Law (1976), Universal Pre-K (2002) and Fair Districts (2010). However, our governors didn't like the fact that we had this power, and over the years (since 1976), the state has applied tougher and tougher requirements to get citizen initiatives on to the ballot. Probably because we got Minimum Wage implemented (2004 and 2020), Medical Cannabis legalized (2016) and Voter Rights Restored (2018), and worst of all, almost got all Marijuana Legalized (2024) and a Woman's Right to Healthcare Privacy (2024) approved.
The last are particularly interesting, as it now seems that there was likely (though yet to be proven) some questionable funding for attack ads against the legalization of marijuana, and certainly, the governor and his cabinet were not shy about threatening the press over the abortion rights campaign. If true, these are hardly the act of a governor who wants to hear the will of the people.
So now we have approval of CB/HB 1205, approved on May 2 and which becomes law immediately. This bill requires that by taking that right that "is reserved to the people," We the People must now:
• Give up our personally identifiable information, including driver's license or last 4 digits of our Social Security number if we want to sign a petition.
• Petition gathers may only gather up to 25 petitions, or be subject to a felony. We can be petition circulators and gather more, but only if we go through rigorous training, and also be subject to egregious fines as well as potential felonies.
• Petitions can be gratuitously challenged, and the signer or gather subject to fines.
• Each petition must have the state certified Financial Impact (FI) on them, and if the FI changes, all previously signed petitions are now invalid, and signature gathering must start again. Given that over 900,000 approved signatures are needed to get on a ballot, this requirement seems almost insurmountable, given Amendment 4's experience with ad-hoc changes being made to the Financial Impact by the state throughout the life of the petition.
There's more — but I encourage you to read the bill for yourself, or the AP interpretation at https://apnews.com/article/florida-citizens-ballot-initiative-constitutional-amendment-desantis-50a5ac0048825c0756c7b850d4b81fed
What can you do on this? Talk to your neighbors. Make sure that they know about the state actively taking away our rights as defined by our state Constitution. Help organizations in the process of putting together citizen's initiatives like the Florida Right to Clean Water. Keep your eyes on the look out for legal activity, as we, the people of this date, take action to protect our right to amend OUR constitution.
Cathie Kozik is president of the League of Women Voters of Sanibel.