TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) \u2014 A proposed amendment to Florida\u2019s constitution that would allow recreational marijuana use for adults is one of 22 citizen initiatives that failed to qualify for the 2026 ballot, state officials said.<\/p>\n
The Florida Department of State announced Sunday that none of the active proposed constitutional amendments by initiative petition met the legal requirements for placement on the November general election ballot.<\/p>\n
The deadline for signatures to qualify for the midterm election was Sunday. Smart & Safe Florida<\/a>, the group behind the marijuana amendment, said they believed they would have the 880,062 signatures needed after all petitions are processed, but state records<\/a> show the amendment was about 100,000 signatures short on Monday.<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe the declaration by the Secretary of State is premature, as the final and complete county-by-county totals for validated petitions are not yet reported,\u201d a Smart & Safe statement said. \u201cWe submitted over 1.4 million signatures and believe when they are all counted, we will have more than enough to make the ballot.\u201d<\/p>\n The exclusion of all amendments follows a yearslong clash between progressive organizers seeking to amend the state\u2019s constitution and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. In 2024, the governor used state money and his political influence<\/a> to successfully campaign<\/a> against efforts to legalize adult personal use of marijuana<\/a> and expand abortion rights<\/a>. <\/p>\n For years, Florida voters have turned to the citizens\u2019 ballot initiative process to bypass the Republican-dominated Legislature and advance progressive policies, such as raising the minimum wage and restoring the voting rights of people with felony convictions.<\/p>\n Last May, DeSantis signed a law creating new hurdles<\/a> for citizen-driven ballot initiatives, changes critics say would make it prohibitively expensive and effectively impossible for grassroots campaigners to get issues on the ballot. Since the passage of the law, a campaign to expand Medicaid in the state announced it\u2019s delaying its push<\/a> to get the question on the ballot until 2028.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) \u2014 A proposed amendment to Florida\u2019s constitution that would allow recreational marijuana use for adults…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[22212,2715,1882,28,30,29,477,571,7659,99,412,62424,1110,4220],"class_list":["post-141401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-constitutional-law","tag-elections","tag-fl-state-wire","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-general-news","tag-health","tag-marijuana","tag-politics","tag-ron-desantis","tag-send-to-apple-news","tag-u-s-news","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}