Florida’s attorney general has withdrawn a request to have the state Supreme Court review a marijuana legalization initiative after election officials determined that the campaign behind the proposal failed to collect enough signatures to qualify for placement on the November ballot.
But the campaign, Smart & Safe Florida, is sharply criticizing the move and is urging the court to reject the notice of dismissal on constitutional grounds.
Advocates have already disputed the secretary of state’s signature count, claiming the campaign submitted over 1.4 million petitions—hundreds of thousands more than the 880,062 valid signatures required to go before voters.
In a filing with the Supreme Court, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) said his office was withdrawing its earlier request for a legal review in the constitutionality of the proposed cannabis initiative because the state claims the campaign submitted an insufficient number of signed petitions. The last count, according to the secretary of state’s office, was 783,592 validated signatures.
The attorney general “respectfully submits that the Court should dismiss this case and cancel the oral argument scheduled for February 5, 2026,” the filing says.
What happens next remains to be seen, but the campaign isn’t immediately giving up the fight to secure ballot placement.
In its reply brief, Smart & Safe Florida said the secretary of state’s office made a determination that the campaign didn’t satisfy requirements for ballot placement based on a “conclusion that the Sponsor failed to meet the requisite signature threshold in light of the invalidations that the Sponsor is contesting.”
“Should the Sponsor prevail in those actions, up to 98,000 petitions would be added to the total, easily surpassing the 880,062 necessary for ballot placement,” it said. “In addition, the day before the Secretary’s announcement, the Sponsor submitted a public records request to all 67 County Supervisors of Elections to ascertain the number of verified valid signed petitions, as well as the number of signed petitions that should have been verified as valid.”
“Depending on the results of that request, the Sponsor may file an action in the coming weeks directly challenging the Secretary of State’s determination that the Sponsor did not obtain the requisite number of verified petition signatures,” the brief states.”The Court should deny the Attorney General’s request for dismissal.”
“If section 16.061(4) were construed to require this Court to dismiss an advisory-opinion case where the Secretary of State’s determination that an initiative no longer qualifies for ballot placement is currently subject to legal challenge, as it is here, the statute would be unconstitutional. Nothing in the Constitution permits the Legislature to authorize the Attorney General to divest this Court of jurisdiction through a withdrawal of a request. As a practical matter, moreover, such a novel procedure would confer on a Secretary of State effectively unreviewable authority to foreclose an initiative’s placement on the ballot, even on legally invalid grounds.”
The court should not be denied jurisdiction to adjudicate the signature issues under legal scrutiny simply because the state determined that there were insufficient signatures, the campaign said. And if the court “concludes that the statute is not amenable to that construction, however, it should hold that the statute is unconstitutional as applied here.”
“The broader context here illustrates the constitutional infirmity in applying the statute to divest the Court of jurisdiction in these circumstances,” it said. “Over 1.4 million Floridians have exercised their constitutionally granted right to sign the Sponsor’s initiative petition to provide for safe, regulated, adult-only use of marijuana.”
“Immediately dismissing advisory-opinion review here, when there are pending outcome-determinative disputes about the Secretary’s disqualification of tens of thousands of petitions, may leave this Court with little or no time to issue an advisory opinion in compliance with that constitutional deadline should the Sponsor prevail in the pending cases,” it continued. “That would frustrate the people’s exercise of their right to amend the Constitution by initiative under Article XI of the Constitution.”
“Affording the Secretary of State effectively unreviewable discretion to withhold initiatives from the ballot is neither contemplated by the Constitution nor necessary for ballot integrity. In fact, this Court has repeatedly confirmed that it retains jurisdiction even if the Secretary of State asserts that the February threshold is not satisfied.”
Meanwhile, the Department of State said on Sunday that 21 other initiative campaigns also failed to turn in sufficient signatures for ballot access.
Ahead of the signature turn-in, Florida’s attorney general and several business and anti-marijuana groups urged the state Supreme Court to block the cannabis initiative, calling it “fatally flawed” and unconstitutional.
The Florida Chamber of Commerce, Florida Legal Foundation and Judge Frank Shepherd filed a separate joint brief stating that the parties remain “especially vigilant about the abuse of the citizen initiative process by out-of-state interests that think of Florida as just another market and the citizen initiative process as just another means of exploiting that market.”
The Florida Chamber of Commerce has consistently opposed attempts to move forward with adult-use legalization, even as its own polling has shown majority support for the reform.
The briefs were filed days after Smart and Safe Florida filed a lawsuit against state officials, alleging that they improperly directed the invalidation of about 71,000 signatures as the turn-in deadline approached.
The campaign fought several legal battles this cycle to ensure that its initiative is able to qualify for ballot placement.
One of the more recent lawsuits, filed in the Leon County circuit court, claimed Secretary of State Cord Byrd (R) directed county election officials to invalidate about 42,000 signatures from so-called “inactive” voters and roughly 29,000 signatures collected by out-of-state petitioners.
That came after another court upheld a previous decision to strike about 200,000 signatures that the state said were invalid because the petitions didn’t include the full text of the proposed initiative. The campaign contested the legal interpretation, but it declined to appeal the decision based on their confidence they’d collected enough signatures to make up the difference.
Last month, the state attorney general’s office opened dozens of criminal investigations and submitted subpoenas requesting records from Smart & Safe Florida and its contractors and subcontractors over alleged fraud related to the petitioning effort.
Activists said in November that they’d collected more than one million signatures to put the cannabis measure on the ballot, but it’s also challenged officials at the state Supreme Court level over delays the certification process, arguing that the review of the ballot content and summary should have moving forward months ago when it reached an initial signature threshold. The state then agreed to move forward with the processing.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) campaigned heavily against an earlier version of the legalization proposal, which received a majority of voters in 2024 but not enough to meet the 60 percent threshold required to pass a constitutional amendment. Former Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) unsuccessfully contested the prior initiative in the courts.
In March, meanwhile, two Democratic members of Congress representing Florida asked the federal government to investigate what they described as “potentially unlawful diversion” of millions in state Medicaid funds via a group with ties to DeSantis. The money was used to fight against a citizen ballot initiative, vehemently opposed by the governor, that would have legalized marijuana for adults.
The lawmakers’ letter followed allegations that a $10 million donation from a state legal settlement was improperly made to the Hope Florida Foundation, which later sent the money to two political nonprofits, which in turn sent $8.5 million to a campaign opposing Amendment 3.
The governor said last February that the newest marijuana legalization measure is in “big time trouble” with the state Supreme Court, predicting it would be blocked from going before voters this year.
“There’s a lot of different perspectives on on marijuana,” DeSantis said. “It should not be in our Constitution. If you feel strongly about it, you have elections for the legislature. Go back candidates that you believe will be able to deliver what your vision is on that.”
“But when you put these things in the Constitution—and I think, I mean, the way they wrote, there’s all kinds of things going on in here. I think it’s going to have big time trouble getting through the Florida Supreme Court,” he said.
The latest initiative was filed with the secretary of state’s office just months after the initial version failed during the November 2024 election—despite an endorsement from President Donald Trump.
Smart & Safe Florida expressed optimism that the revised version would succeed in 2026. The campaign—which in the last election cycle received tens of millions of dollars from cannabis industry stakeholders, principally the multi-state operator Trulieve—incorporated certain changes into the new version that seem responsive to criticism opponents raised during the 2024 push.
For example, it now specifically states that the “smoking and vaping of marijuana in any public place is prohibited.”Another section asserts that the legislature would need to approve rules dealing with the “regulation of the time, place, and manner of the public consumption of marijuana.”
In 2023, the governor accurately predicted that the 2024 cannabis measure from the campaign would survive a legal challenge from the state attorney general. It’s not entirely clear why he feels this version would face a different outcome.
While there’s uncertainty around how the state’s highest court will navigate the measure, a poll released last February showed overwhelming bipartisan voter support for the reform—with 67 percent of Florida voters backing legalization, including 82 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans.
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n the background, a recent poll from a Trump-affiliated research firm found that nearly 9 in 10 Florida voters say they should have the right to decide to legalize marijuana in the state.
Meanwhile, Florida lawmakers recently approved a bill to significantly reduce the fee for military veterans to obtain medical marijuana registry identification cards, slashing the cost to one-fifth of the current amount.
The subcommittee vote on the fee reduction bill came about a week after the Senate Regulated Industries Committee advanced separate legislation to ban smoking or vaping marijuana in public places. Rep. Alex Andrade (R) is sponsoring a similar bill to ban public cannabis smoking in the House of Representatives.
Here’s an overview of other pending Florida marijuana bills:
- A House lawmaker is sponsoring a bill to legalize recreational marijuana that also aims to break up what he calls “monopolies” in the state’s current medical cannabis program by revising the business licensing structure.
- Another representative’s bill would protect the parental rights of medical cannabis patients, preventing them from losing custody of their children for using their medicine in accordance with state law.
- Other lawmakers are sponsoring legislation to expand the state’s medical marijuana program, in part by increasing supply limits for patients and waiving registration fees for honorably discharged military veterans. The proposals would also allow doctors to recommend cannabis to any patient who has a condition for which they have been prescribed opioids.
- A senator is sponsoring a bill to legalize home cultivation of marijuana for registered medical cannabis patients in the state.
Photo courtesy of Mike Latimer.
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