State elections officials on Monday sent a proposed recreational-marijuana constitutional amendment to Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office, effectively putting an end to a lawsuit that backers of the measure filed to try to trigger a Florida Supreme Court review of the proposal.
Monday’s move will set in motion Supreme Court review of the measure, an essential step to get on the 2026 ballot.
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It came on the last day of a deadline set by justices for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration to respond to a lawsuit filed by the Smart & Safe Florida political committee, which accused elections officials of improperly holding up the ballot-initiative process.
Court documents filed Monday by attorneys for Secretary of State Cord Byrd included a letter from Byrd submitting the proposed constitutional amendment to Uthmeier.
The documents also included a letter from state Division of Elections Director Maria Matthews to Smart & Safe Florida verifying that the committee had met a threshold number of signatures in congressional districts required before court review.
The lawsuit, which sought what is known as a “writ of mandamus,” should be “dismissed as moot,” Byrd’s lawyers wrote, adding that “mandamus proceedings become moot when the respondent takes the action the petition seeks to compel.”
The lawsuit asked the court for an order requiring state elections officials to issue the letters to Uthmeier and the committee, Byrd’s response said.
Because the letters were sent Monday, the case “has been so fully resolved that a judicial determination can have no actual effect,” the response said, citing a previous court decision.
Smart & Safe Florida faces a Feb. 1 deadline to submit 880,062 valid signatures to put its proposal to allow recreational use of marijuana on the November 2026 ballot.
According to the state Division of Elections website, the committee had submitted 675,334 valid signatures as of Tuesday morning.
The committee had to submit at least 220,016 statewide signatures to trigger the Supreme Court review, a threshold it exceeded in early June, and meet numbers in congressional districts.
Smart & Safe Florida in August asked Byrd’s office about the delay in forwarding the measure to Uthmeier but did not receive a response, according to the lawsuit.
DeSantis led efforts in 2024 to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment, also sponsored by Smart & Safe Florida, to allow recreational marijuana. The committee then launched another effort to get on the 2026 ballot.
Although the state has retreated from the stand-off about triggering the Supreme Court review, other legal wrangling about the proposed constitutional amendment continues.
Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper on Friday will hear arguments in a lawsuit filed last month by Smart & Safe Florida accusing Byrd’s office of illegally directing county supervisors of elections to invalidate more than 200,000 petitions.
The dispute involves an October directive issued by Matthews requiring supervisors to scrap petitions that did not include the full text of the proposal, which the committee sent to voters.
The lawsuit alleges that nothing in Florida law requires that “the full text” of a proposal be provided or displayed to voters before they sign petitions.
In a court document filed Monday, lawyers for Byrd argued that Smart & Safe Florida’s legal complaint “lacks merit for numerous reasons, including that it ignores key constitutional, statutory, and regulatory requirements with regard to Florida’s ballot initiative process.”
State law gives Byrd’s office “the authority to obtain and maintain uniformity in Florida’s election laws and to direct the county supervisors of elections on the performance of their official duties,” the state’s lawyers said.
“No statute gives ballot sponsors the right to decide for themselves how their petition form should look or whether to ignore or comply with the secretary’s regulations,” Benjamin Gibson and Tara Price of the Shutts & Bowen LLP firm wrote.
Smart & Safe Florida disputed the state’s arguments Monday in an acerbic document, which kicked off with a retelling of a classic scene from a Marx Brothers movie that ends with one character asking another, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
The petitions sent to voters complied with statutory requirements, wrote Glenn Burhans, an attorney with the Stearns Weaver Miller firm who represents the committee.
“The secretary asks this court to deny that the petition contained in the mail package is identical to the form approved by the secretary. The secretary further asks this court to deny that Smart & Safe provided the full text form to voters by way of a dedicated webpage address. Both contentions belie credulity, and no amount of linguistic contortions or misdirection can distract from the simple fact: Smart & Safe complied with the plain language” of the rule, Burhans argued.
Byrd contends that a petition form sent to voters by mail was altered after being approved by his office because it included a link to Smart & Safe Florida’s website on the back of the form. The link contained the full text of the petition.
The full text form must be provided or displayed wherever the petition is circulated and must be shown to voters before petitions are signed, the state’s lawyers argued in the document filed Monday.
“It is not enough to tell the voter where they can go to locate the full text of the proposed amendment,” the lawyers wrote.
Smart & Safe Florida’s attorneys urged Cooper to order Byrd to tell county supervisors of elections to re-validate the scrapped petitions.
“The secretary tried to throw a wrench into the machine in the eleventh hour by issuing his secret directive. Now there is confusion amongst the county supervisors, which can only be resolved with a declaration from this court and a follow up directive issued by the secretary correcting his erroneous prior directive. Smart & Safe seeks nothing more,” the committee argued Monday.