Legal wrangling over a judge’s decision blocking a key part of a new law that added restrictions to Florida’s ballot-initiative process has continued to escalate at a federal appeals court, as the state calls for the ruling to be put on hold “as soon as possible.”
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker this month issued a preliminary injunction against part of the sweeping elections law passed this spring by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. The decision blocked a prohibition in the law on non-Florida residents and non-U.S. citizens collecting and delivering petitions.
The restriction “imposes a severe burden on political expression that the state has failed to justify,” Walker wrote in the decision, which kept in place a number of other restrictions in the law.
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Along with appealing the preliminary injunction, lawyers for the state asked the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay of Walker’s order. Such a stay would allow the disputed part of the law to be enforced while the litigation plays out.
But attorneys for Smart & Safe Florida, a political committee sponsoring a proposed 2026 constitutional amendment to allow recreational use of marijuana, pushed back against the stay request and accused the state of trying to advance “a novel theory that upends” prior U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
“Every (federal court) circuit that has addressed the issue in over 20 years has concluded, like the district court here, that a state cannot categorically ban nonresidents from circulating initiative petitions,” Glenn Burhans, an attorney with the Stearns Weaver Miller firm, wrote in a document filed Thursday.
The state’s lawyers have argued that investigating petition gatherers who don’t live in the state is problematic and that the restrictions are aimed at preventing fraud.
But Smart & Safe Florida’s attorneys countered that the state’s fraud claims are “unsupported … — never mind that none of the fraud appellants (the state) discuss is attributable to nonresidents” and argued that other appeals courts have “rejected the same ilk of argument” about nonresidents.
“To start, appellants provide no evidence that nonresident circulators engage in any petition fraud — let alone unusually high rates of petition fraud — or materially impede investigations,” Burhans wrote in Thursday’s document.
Burhans also disputed that out-of-state workers are more difficult to track down and punish, saying that the state’s lawyers “have not identified even one instance in which a nonresident circulator refused to accept service or submit to the jurisdiction of Florida’s courts.”
In a document filed Monday at the Atlanta-based court, lawyers for the DeSantis administration wrote that the state doesn’t need to “link every crime to an out-of-state or non-citizen circulator before banning these individuals from collecting signed petitions.”
The state “doesn’t need to wait for more Floridians to have their information misappropriated, identities stolen or signatures forged,” Mohammad Jazil, an attorney with the Holtzman Vogel law firm who represents the DeSantis administration, wrote.
“Legislative findings, investigatory delays, ongoing investigations and a dose of common sense are enough,” he added.
DeSantis sought additional restrictions on the state’s initiative process after fierce battles last year about proposed constitutional amendments on abortion rights and recreational marijuana. The measures, which DeSantis campaigned against, failed to receive the 60 percent voter approval required to pass.
Florida Decides Healthcare, a political committee sponsoring a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at expanding Medicaid coverage, filed the lawsuit challenging the new restrictions in May. Smart & Safe Florida, which sponsored the marijuana amendment in 2024 and is trying again in 2026, also is a plaintiff in the case. A committee proposing a measure aimed at ensuring access to clean water also has joined the challengers.
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Echoing arguments made throughout the litigation, the state’s court filing Monday argued that the restrictions were rooted in the state Office of Election Crimes and Security finding “widespread fraud” in the ballot-initiative process.
The restrictions against non-residents and non-U.S. citizens do not violate First Amendment speech rights because “there’s no speech linked with the collection of signed petitions,” Jazil wrote.
“Collection is pure conduct. Front-end speech is entirely separate from the back-end conduct that’s regulated here,” the state’s lawyer said.
Jazil also alleged wrongdoing by Smart & Safe Florida petition workers, saying the committee’s “circulators are among the worst offenders.”
The state is justified in seeking to “bar a subset of possible bad actors” from collecting signatures, Jazil wrote in Monday’s document.
The appeals-court battle is taking place as Smart & Safe Florida appears on pace to meet a Feb. 1 deadline to submit 880,000 signatures needed to place the recreational marijuana proposal on next year’s ballot. The committee had submitted nearly 610,000 valid signatures as of Tuesday afternoon, according to the state Division of Elections website.
Walker’s ruling acknowledged the state “has great leeway in regulating the ballot initiative process” but said the restrictions on who can collect and deliver petition signatures went too far.
“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 wrote.
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 law also 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.
