Legalized pot campaign won’t appeal tossed petitions, urges state to tabulate thousands of uncounted signatures

A campaign to put recreational marijuana back on Florida’s statewide ballot won’t appeal a decision tossing 200,000 signatures.

A Leon County judge last week upheld a decision by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to invalidate 200,000 petitions collected by the Smart & Safe Florida campaign, as reported by the Tallahassee Democrat.

Trulieve, the state’s largest medical marijuana company, is a major backer of Smart & Safe Florida, donating nearly $26 million to support the initiative for the 2026 ballot.

That’s a significant setback as the campaign aims to gather more than 880,000 signatures before a Feb. 1 deadline. But it’s one the campaign believes it can overcome without the tossed petitions.

“The Smart & Safe campaign will not appeal the recent court ruling to invalidate over 200,000 verified petitions, as we are confident in the ability to submit enough petitions to make ballot position so long as the state does its job in good faith to process the submitted petitions and accurately report the verification totals,” reads a statement from the campaign.

In fact, based on the number of signatures the campaign has already submitted, it may be close to the required amount even without the tossed petitions. The campaign said the state is sitting on some 600,000 uncounted ballots.

“To date, excluding the mail-in ballots, the campaign has submitted over 1,010,000 signed petitions. Given that the state has not updated its online reporting to reflect submitted petitions and due to the excessive backlog caused by the state’s three-month freeze on petition verification, we urge the Secretary of State to timely process the petitions and update its reporting of the verified petitions as required by law. The public deserves to have their petitions counted.”

At the moment, the state lists 675,307 valid petitions to put the measure on the ballot, though that number includes the 200,000 petitions now tossed over format issues.

Secretary of State Cord Byrd cheered the judicial ruling and said it validates his Department’s interpretation that the format didn’t comply with state law.

“The judge ruled that the Department’s interpretation of the law is correct and that the disputed petitions should not count. Kudos to my legal team, the best in the biz!” he posted on X.

The campaign disagrees and feels confident it could win on appeal, but fears extending the legal fight could lead to missing the February deadline.

But the campaign also feels confident that many of the signatures tossed out can be recouped in other ways. For starters, more than 20,000 petitions on valid format cards were tossed because they duplicated some of the signatures among the 200,000 now-invalidated signatures. The campaign wants those petitions to get a second look.

And for any supporters of the referendum whose signatures were tossed by the court ruling, the campaign is encouraging them to resubmit correctly formatted cards.