Marijuana amendment effort drops appeal as signature fight enters new phase

ORLANDO, Fla. - The dispute over 200,000 tossed petition signatures has reshaped the path for a proposed 2026 recreational marijuana amendment in Florida. 

With the sponsoring committee declining to appeal a judge’s ruling, the fight now shifts to deadlines, legal hurdles and an increasingly restrictive petition process.

What we know:

Smart & Safe Florida, the political committee behind the recreational marijuana amendment, will not appeal a Leon County judge’s ruling that upheld the state’s invalidation of roughly 200,000 petition signatures. 

As of Tuesday, the Division of Elections listed 675,307 verified signatures for the measure, short of the 880,062 required by Feb. 1 to reach the 2026 ballot. The committee, however, says the state’s public tally is incomplete and that it has submitted about 1,010,000 signatures to supervisors statewide, not counting the batch that was thrown out.

Judge John Cooper’s ruling stemmed from the committee’s challenge to an Oct. 3 directive from Division of Elections Director Maria Matthews ordering supervisors to invalidate petitions that omitted the full text of the proposed amendment. 

The committee mailed those petitions directly to voters, and the state argued the signatures were "not obtained legally" and that the petition form had been altered without approval.

What we don't know:

It remains unclear how many of the petitions submitted—beyond the 675,000 officially verified—will ultimately be counted once supervisors finish processing the backlog created by a state-mandated moratorium. 

It is also unknown whether the Florida Supreme Court will approve the measure’s ballot wording, a required step before any amendment can appear on the ballot. 

And despite the committee’s assertion that it has more than enough raw signatures, there is no definitive indication of whether the verification pace will meet the Feb. 1 deadline.

The backstory:

Smart & Safe Florida previously pushed a recreational marijuana amendment in 2024 but fell short of the 60 percent approval required for constitutional changes. 

The DeSantis administration aggressively opposed that initiative, and tensions between the committee and state officials have persisted into the 2026 campaign.

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The conflict over petition forms dates to March, when Secretary of State Cord Byrd’s office issued a cease-and-desist order after discovering that the back of certain petitions included a link to the committee’s website rather than remaining blank, as the approved version required. 

A new law that took effect July 1 further complicated matters by mandating that petitions include the full amendment text and imposing a 90-day pause on signature processing.

Timeline:

The 90-day moratorium on petition processing ended Sept. 30. Days later, Matthews issued her directive ordering the disputed petitions scrapped. On Friday, Judge Cooper upheld that directive.

This week, Smart & Safe Florida waived its right to appeal. At the same time, Byrd’s office initiated the first steps for Florida Supreme Court review—just before the court’s deadline for the state to respond to a separate lawsuit filed by the committee over alleged delays in ballot review. 

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The Feb. 1 signature-verification deadline now looms as the next major milestone.

What they're saying:

Smart & Safe Florida told the court it was waiving its right to appeal "to provide finality to this matter and certainty to the result." 

The state argued the invalid petitions were flawed because the signatures "were not obtained legally" and because the committee changed the petition format without authorization.

David Ramba of the Florida Supervisors of Elections association told the News Service of Florida that county offices are moving quickly through the backlog created by the moratorium. 

"We’re cranking them out," he said. "We’re processing them as they come in, in the order that they are received."