A Leon County circuit judge Thursday ruled that the Florida Division of Elections is required to update its website to reflect the number of valid petition signatures for a proposed recreational-marijuana constitutional amendment.
Judge Jonathan Sjostrom backed arguments by the Smart & Safe Florida political committee, which faces a Sunday deadline for submitting enough valid signatures to put the proposed amendment on the November ballot.
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The committee filed a lawsuit this month alleging that the Division of Elections was not complying with a requirement to post weekly totals of valid signatures from Dec. 1 through Feb. 1.
The website showed 675,307 valid signatures for about two months. After the lawsuit was filed, state elections officials updated the totals, with the website Thursday showing 760,002 valid signatures.
Smart & Safe Florida needs to submit at least 880,062 valid signatures statewide and meet signature thresholds in congressional districts.
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Sjostrom noted in his ruling Thursday that one more end-of-the-week deadline was approaching before the Sunday deadline. He wrote that Smart & Safe Florida “has demonstrated a clear legal right to have the respondents (elections officials) perform their clear legal duty” under a law that includes the posting requirement.
The state attributed the delay in posting numbers to scrutiny of potentially invalid signatures.
But in the lawsuit, Smart & Safe Florida said that without updated numbers, it was “essentially flying blind as to its ballot placement status and is left guessing where it needs to deploy its assets to ensure it makes both the statewide requirement and the congressional district requirement.”
The dispute came amid other legal battles between Smart & Safe Florida and the state about the proposed amendment, which would allow people ages 21 and older to use recreational marijuana.
