Florida Decides Healthcare Executive Director Mitch Emerson talks with reporters outside the federal courthouse in Tallahassee on Feb. 9, 2026. (Photo by Christine Sexton/Florida Phoenix)
A legal challenge to Florida’s restrictions on ballot initiatives kicked off Monday as groups pushing measures on marijuana and Medicaid expansion hope to convince a federal judge that a 2025 state law is unconstitutional.
The trial over Florida’s new law — passed last year after initiatives on abortion and marijuana narrowly failed to pass in the 2024 election — is expected to last up to two weeks, according to the attorneys involved in the legal challenge.
“This wasn’t an attempt to make citizen-led ballot initiatives harder. It attempted to make them impossible,” Florida Decides Healthcare Executive Director Mitch Emerson told reporters Monday outside the federal courthouse in Tallahassee.
Among other things, the 2025 law (passed as HB 1205) requires petition circulators to be Florida residents and United States citizens. The law prohibits convicted felons who have not had their voting rights restored from circulating petitions and requires all petition circulators to register with the Florida Division of Elections.
HB 1205 allows the state to levy a $50,000 fine against an organization that allows those categories of people to even handle petitions. The fine is per violation.
Moreover, the 2025 law prohibits a person who had not registered with the state from possessing more than 25 signed petition forms (in addition to his or her own signed form or one belonging to an immediate family member.)
Those changes had a chilling effect on Florida Decides’ operations, which relied on volunteer petition gatherers, former organizing director Ana-Christina Acosta testified.
“It made everyone very nervous,” Acosta said of the criminal penalties in the sweeping law.
Acosta, who worked with volunteers in her previous position, testified that Florida Decides did not vet its volunteers to determine whether they were in-state residents, United States citizens, or convicted felons.
“We had no reason to,” she said.
Acosta said the changes in the law “completely killed,” how Florida Decides used volunteers to help collect signed petitions.
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Florida is one of 10 states not to expand Medicaid to low-income, childless adults as allowed by federal law. With Republicans controlling the Legislature and the Governor’s Mansion, there have been efforts to expand Medicaid in Florida since 2018 but to no avail.
None have been successful, even before the 2025 law, noted Mo Jazil, an attorney representing Secretary of State Cord Byrd in defending the law.
Florida Decides also worked with The Outreach Team to help gather petition signatures during the 2024 campaign. Jordan Simmons, a Missouri resident who serves as that organization’ regional validation director during the Medicaid expansion campaign, hiring salaried staff. At its apex, Simmons said, there were upward of 35 salaried people on staff.
When it came to job candidates, Simmons said, he looked for people with campaign and petition-drive experience and that three of the people he hired to serve as office directors were not Florida residents.
The law also trims back from 30 days to 10 days the time to deliver signed petition forms to a supervisor of elections and makes it a third-degree felony for a petition circulator to fill in missing information on a petition.
Acosta and Simmons both testified that, before the new law, a petition circulator would fill in missing information, such as a voter’s county of residence, on a signed petition form.
Simmons testified that the requirement that voters provide their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security numbers also harmed FDH’s petition drive.
People, he said, became more hesitant to sign petitions wondering, “Is this a scam?”
‘A life or death issue’
Florida legislators passed the law in 2025 after citizens’ initiatives to allow abortion and recreational pot nearly passed last November.
Critics contend that the new law — with all of its restrictions on groups and who can collect signatures — will make it nearly impossible for outside organizations to ever place an initiative on the ballot in the future.
Florida Decides Healthcare challenged the law along with Smart & Safe Florida, which is pushing for recreational marijuana use for adults, the League of Women Voters of Florida, League of Women
Voters of Florida Education Fund, League of United Latin American Citizens, and FloridaRightToCleanWater.org.
The two-week trial began in the immediate aftermath of the state announcing that no citizen initiatives made the November 2026 ballot, even though organizers of a new measure on marijuana have disputed this.
“The truth is, these sort of practices clearly undermine the idea of what is an American process and participating in direct democracy. This is something that is a foundational right of our Constitution, and by making these sort of processes harder, it only continues to further undermine that we want to have, the ability to just talk to voters about the issues and give them the opportunity to participate in their government and have a say in the policies that affect their lives every single day,” Emerson said.
The court hearing came as the number of uninsured residents in Florida is on the rise. Enrollment in Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, plans for 2026 dipped by 5% to 4,474,300 residents after the elimination by Congress of the enhanced premiums tax credits that helped lower the costs of health insurance for people.
Allowing Florida residents to vote on a Medicaid expansion is more important than ever, Emerson said.
“We’re now looking at a situation where, this year, we are expecting about one in five Floridians to be uninsured. We are talking about 3.7 million individuals who could have access to health care that otherwise won’t,” he said.
“We’re seeing hospital closures, medical professionals, and inevitably, this is a life-or-death issue where people will die because they do not have access to health care that they otherwise would if they had the ability to vote on Medicaid expansion.
“And to that end, I’ll just say this is a broadly popular issue. Every poll that we have done and seen it is in the high 60s and 70s. So, this is something that people want, people are clamoring for, but they’re trying to restrict our ability to have the people’s voices heard.”
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