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State lawmakers are trying to make it significantly harder for Floridians to put constitutional amendments on the ballot. We're fighting back.
Pamela,
Citizen-led democracy is under attack in my home state of Florida, where extremist lawmakers are trying to make it nearly impossible for everyday people to put constitutional amendments on the ballot.
Multiple bills would place extreme barriers on the initiative process, including:
• Requiring a $1 million bond in order to start collecting signatures
• Imposing excessive fines for small violations in the process
• Creating new layers of government review before signature petitions can even move forward
• Reducing the number of days a sponsor would have to deliver signatures from 30 to 10
All in all, they'd create an uphill battle for grassroots movements like ours seeking to make change. Floridians have a long history of using the ballot initiative process to drive meaningful reform — including on redistricting in 2010. These bills represent an attempt to shut down that process, silence voters, and attack our democracy.
We still have time to fight back, but we have to move fast — the state house is set to vote on one of these proposals today.
All On The Line has mobilized Floridians to contact their lawmakers and call on them to oppose these pieces of legislation. And we need your help to sustain our work pushing back against similar anti-democracy efforts across the country.
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The new proposed obstacles aren't about election integrity — they're about limiting public participation.
They're about keeping power out of the hands of the people.
And they don't seem to have popular support. A GOP pollster found that 55% of the state's Republicans oppose making it more difficult to put constitutional amendments on the ballot — just 17% support it. And nearly 3 in 4 Republican primary voters broadly favor the current citizen-led system.
Here's something else you should know: protecting the constitutional amendment process is critical for fair maps going forward.
To back up a little: Our affiliate, the National Redistricting Foundation, initiated a recent legal challenge to Florida's congressional map, which clearly violates the state constitution — specifically one of the amendments passed by voters in 2010 — by diluting the political power of Black Floridians.
We are still awaiting the results of that challenge. Either way, fair maps advocates like All On The Line will rely on direct democracy as a backstop to ensure we have fair maps and a fair redistricting process for 2030 and beyond.
But if the legislature makes it virtually impossible to do that type of organizing, they could push reform out of reach and lock manipulated maps into place for years to come.
We must stop Florida lawmakers' calculated attempts to subvert the will of voters. So we're doing everything we can to prevent these bills from passing.
We'll keep you updated on what comes next.
Thanks,
Sofia Pedroso
Digital Director, All On The Line
All On The Line is the grassroots advocacy campaign supported by the National Redistricting Action Fund. Support our work to end gerrymandering.
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