Florida election officials are urging a judge to shut down a lawsuit that seeks to restore tens of thousands of invalidated signatures for a recreational marijuana amendment, arguing that strict verification is necessary to stop fraud.
Secretary of State Cord Byrd’s legal team filed arguments last Friday defending the decision to toss roughly 71,000 petition signatures. The move comes at a critical moment for the sponsor, Smart & Safe Florida, which faces a tight February 1 deadline to submit nearly 900,000 valid signatures to make the November ballot.
The dispute centers on two main groups of rejected petitions. Approximately 42,000 were signed by “inactive” voters—people who are still registered but haven’t voted recently or confirmed their address. Another 29,000 were collected by out-of-state workers.
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State attorneys argue that accepting petitions from inactive voters opens the door to fraud. They noted that the state mails notifications to voters when their signatures are verified; if a voter is inactive and no longer lives at their registered address, they won’t receive that notice, making it harder to catch forged signatures.
“If a petition validation notice … is sent to the registered address for the inactive voter, it is unlikely to be received or heeded,” Byrd’s attorneys wrote, warning that “potentially fraudulent petitions may not be invalidated.”
Smart & Safe Florida calls this reasoning absurd, pointing out that inactive voters are legally allowed to cast ballots in the actual election.
“The absurd result of the secretary’s directive is that ‘inactive’ voters can vote for the proposed amendment but cannot have their petitions counted to place the proposed amendment on the ballot,” the committee argued in its lawsuit.
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The fight over out-of-state petition gatherers is equally tangled. A 2025 state law banned non-residents from collecting signatures, but a federal judge temporarily blocked that law last summer. Smart & Safe Florida utilized out-of-state workers during that window. The state now contends that even with the temporary injunction, the workers were never eligible under Florida statutes.
As of Monday, the state reported a tally of 675,307 valid signatures, well short of the required 880,062. The committee claims the real number is over 1 million, awaiting verification. This is the group’s second attempt to legalize recreational use after a 2024 measure failed to reach the required 60 percent voter threshold.
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