A federal judge has blocked a key part of a new law that imposed additional restrictions on the state’s ballot-initiative process, saying a ban on non-Florida residents and non-U.S. citizens collecting and delivering petitions “imposes a severe burden on political expression that the state has failed to justify.”
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker’s ruling Tuesday, however, allowed several other parts of the law to remain in effect, including a requirement that people who gather more than 25 signed petitions register with the state and a moratorium on elections supervisors processing petitions from July 1 through Sept. 30.
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Florida Decides Healthcare, a political committee sponsoring a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at expanding Medicaid coverage, filed the court challenge in May after the Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis approved the law. Smart & Safe Florida, a committee behind a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow recreational marijuana, also is a plaintiff in the case. A committee proposing a measure aimed at ensuring access to clean water also has joined the challengers.
Walker’s ruling came after the committees requested a preliminary injunction to block parts of the law, which took effect July 1.
The restriction on who can collect and deliver petition signatures went too far in limiting the committees’ activities, the judge said.
The state “has great leeway in regulating the ballot initiative process,” Walker acknowledged.
“But here, the state has categorically barred entire classes of people from participating in the core political speech that is central to this process. Moreover, the state has failed to demonstrate that this severe burden on speech is narrowly tailored to furthering its compelling interest in investigating and combatting fraud in the petition initiative process,” he added.
Under the law, groups that “knowingly” violate the restriction on non-U.S. citizens and non-Florida residents could face $50,000 fines and other sanctions. Petitions delivered by such people would have to be scrapped.
The provisions in the law “force plaintiffs to choose between curtailing their First Amendment rights to engage in core political speech via petition circulation or risk invalidation of verified petitions, crippling civil penalties and further enforcement actions,” Walker wrote.
The judge found that the plaintiffs are “substantially likely to succeed on their claims that these provisions violate the First Amendment,” meeting a court standard when weighing whether a preliminary injunction is justified.
Walker’s order prohibited state and local election officials from enforcing the restriction on the three committees seeking to place measures on the 2026 ballot. The order also blocked state and local prosecutors from pursuing civil or criminal sanctions for violations.
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Lawyers for the DeSantis administration have contended that the restriction on out-of-state residents and non-U.S. citizens handling signed petitions was necessary to alleviate difficulties investigating potential fraud conducted by people who are outside Florida.
But Walker said he found that argument “unpersuasive.”
“Even if the defendants are enjoined from enforcing the prohibition on non-residents and non-citizens from engaging in petition circulation, Florida’s law enforcement agencies maintain an arsenal of criminal provisions that remain enforceable against bad actors and fraudsters,” Walker’s order said.
The DeSantis administration’s arguments relied in large part on a report by the state Office of Election Crimes and Security that found instances of fraud related to 2024 ballot initiatives seeking to allow recreational marijuana and put abortion rights in the state Constitution. Both of those initiatives did not pass.
But Walker said the state report did not indicate that non-citizens were engaging in fraud while gathering signed petitions.
“Based on these isolated instances of non-citizens allegedly behaving badly in other contexts within the universe of election regulations, defendants urge this court to assume there must also be a problem with non-citizen fraudsters who engage in petition circulation. But mere assumptions are no substitute for actual evidence demonstrating that it is necessary to burden plaintiffs’ ability to communicate their messages to meet the state’s concerns,” Walker wrote.
Among other provisions, the law requires people who collect more than 25 petitions, in addition to their own and certain family members’ petitions, to register with the state. Previously, unpaid volunteers could gather and deliver an unlimited number of petitions.
Walker rejected the committees’ effort to block that part of the law and turned down a request to block a requirement that petition gatherers register with the state and provide their names, addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The committees argued the registration requirement frightened volunteers who do not want to share such personal information.
The plaintiffs “have not demonstrated, at this juncture, that the registration requirements pose an impermissibly severe burden on speech,” Walker’s order said.
The law also set a 90-day moratorium, which went into effect July 1, on elections officials processing petitions aimed at the 2026 ballot. Florida Decides Healthcare argued that the delay will have a negative impact on its ability to recruit volunteers and will dampen contributions from supporters, in part because they won’t be able to tell if the effort is gaining enough traction with voters.
But Walker found that the committee failed to show that it has suffered a “concrete and particularized speech or associational injury” due to the moratorium, saying the “asserted injury is largely conjectural and flows not directly from the moratorium itself, but from its anticipated downstream effects, which almost entirely depend on the proclivities and independent actions of third parties.”
Walker’s ruling established a “clear and achievable path” for the Medicaid measure to achieve placement on the 2026 ballot, according to Florida Decides Healthcare Executive Director Mitch Emerson.
“The judge affirmed what we’ve said all along, that all people, including thousands of dedicated volunteers, are able to continue supporting this campaign and have the right to engage in direct democracy,” Emerson said in a statement.
Sponsors of the initiatives must submit about 880,000 valid signatures by Feb. 1 for placement on the 2026 ballot. The proposals also must undergo scrutiny by the Florida Supreme Court and a financial analysis by state economists.
So far, Florida Decides Healthcare has submitted about 62,000 valid signatures for the Medicaid proposal.
Meanwhile, Smart & Safe Florida, which also sponsored last year’s unsuccessful marijuana proposal, has submitted about 613,000 valid signatures and has surpassed the threshold to trigger a Supreme Court review and a financial-impact analysis.
