The latest effort to legalize marijuana in Florida encountered a legal setback, but those behind a new amendment insist they still can qualify for the 2026 ballot.

Florida election officials have instructed local election supervisors to discard 200,000 petition signatures, claiming they are invalid. Smart & Safe Florida, the group pushing the initiative, challenged the decision in court. However, in a ruling from the bench in late November, Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper sided with the state.

Smart & Safe, which for years has relied on millions from the state’s largest medical marijuana provider, Trulieve, announced on November 24 that it would not appeal Cooper’s ruling.

“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,” the organization said in a prepared statement.

To place an initiative on the ballot, the group must gather more than 880,000 signatures from Florida voters. Smart & Safe says it still has more than 1 million signatures, even without the ones disqualified by the state.

The deadline for validating petition signatures is February 1.

In its statement, the organization urged Secretary of State Cord Byrd 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.”

Those backing the legalization effort attempted but failed to pass a measure in the 2024 election. Gov. Ron DeSantis sharply criticized the amendment, and his then-chief of staff, James Uthmeier (now Florida attorney general), led the political committee that urged voters to turn it down. The amendment fell short of the 60 percent threshold required to pass.

In early 2025, Smart & Safe renewed its push and mailed a copy of a reworked initiative to millions of voters. But instead of providing a complete text of the amendment, it listed a website address on the back of the petition form that had been approved by state officials. That website address took voters to a page on Smart & Safe website that included the entire amendment.

Byrd, however, sent Smart & Safe a “cease and desist” letter in which he questioned the legality of the forms and stated that they’d been altered without permission. State officials also demanded the organization hand over names and addresses of those who received the forms. In early October, the Division of Elections instructed supervisors to invalidate roughly 200,000 signed forms.

Smart & Safe challenged the state’s directive to local election supervisors, but after a one-day hearing, Cooper ruled with the state.

Republican Party of Florida chair Evan Power applauded Cooper’s ruling.

“Gov. DeSantis did the right thing by enforcing the law and protecting the integrity of our ballot,” Power said. “Floridians will not be misled. If you want to change our constitution, you follow the rules — period.”

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