This marks the second time that U.S. District Judge Mark Walker has been asked to put on hold the contentious new law that Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican legislators pushed through after two measures dealing with abortion access and recreational marijuana nearly passed last November.
In his latest ruling, Walker stopped the state from enforcing HB 1205’s ban against non-Florida residents and non-U.S. citizens collecting petitions. This was one of the key requests from groups behind the lawsuit, including Florida Decides Healthcare, the group behind the Medicaid expansion initiative. Also involved are Smart & Safe Florida, pushing a new recreational marijuana amendment, and Florida Right to Clean Water.
But Walker did not go along with a request to block a 90-day moratorium on verification of signatures which only was being challenged by FDH. Walker said the organization lacked standing and didn’t prove a substantial likelihood that it would succeed on the merits, among the legal triggers plaintiffs must prove to obtain an injunction.
“According to FDH, this delay in updated verified petition counts, in turn, will hamstring FDH’s ability to generate enthusiasm and support, persuade donors to commit funds to FDH’s cause, and ultimately, succeed in placing its initiative on the ballot next year due to the anticipated impact that this delay will have on the expectations and reactions of third parties not before this court,” Walker wrote. “But this asserted injury is largely conjectural and flows not directly from the moratorium itself, but from its anticipated downstream effects … .”
Walker also refused to block the requirement that those gathering petitions complete and sign in a voter’s presence an affidavit that includes their names, permanent addresses and that they were not paid on a per-signature basis. Those provisions were challenged by the Florida League of Women Voters and Florida Right to Clean Water, which asserted a chilling effect because of fear of harassment.
“For this chill to amount to a cognizable injury in fact, the fear of harassment must be an objectively reasonable one,” he wrote.
“But here, to support their contention that the asserted subjective fears of harassment constitute an injury for standing purposes, Plaintiffs only point to either generalized fears of potential harassment from unidentified members of the public or instances of harassment and political violence that are wholly disconnected from their connection to the protected expression at issue in this case.”
Walker did agree to block a provision in the law that requires all petition circulators—paid and unpaid—to be state residents and U.S. citizens. The law allows the state to impose a $50,000 fine per non-resident circulator.
Smart & Safe, the sponsor of a recreational marijuana ballot, testified in court last month that it is collecting about a one-third of the 78,000 petition signatures per week that it collected before the enactment of the challenged provisions.
‘Dramatic mismatch’
The state argued that the residency and citizenship requirements are necessary to combat fraud, but Walker said they went too far.“To be sure, investigating and combating fraud in the initiative process is certainly a compelling interest—the question is whether a complete ban on non residents and non-citizens, even lawful permanent residents, from engaging in petition circulation is narrowly tailored to furthering this interest,” Walker wrote.
“Here, the record demonstrates a dramatic mismatch between the State’s interest in combating fraud in the initiative process and limiting the pool of potential petition circulators to U.S. citizens who are Florida residents.”
Voters in Florida over the last two decades have passed a number of initiatives opposed by GOP legislators, including measures that raised the state’s minimum wage and allowed for the use of medical marijuana. Last November, the recreational marijuana and abortion initiatives fell just below the 60% margin needed to win.
Lawmakers responded with HB 1205, which completely overhauls the process used to collect signatures.
The group that first launched the lawsuit lauded Walker’s ruling.
“Within two months of this law passing, a federal judge has now ruled twice that different parts of it are unconstitutional and violate the constitutional rights of Floridians to participate and have a say in their state’s democracy. These rulings tell you everything you need to know about how extreme this law is,” Mitch Emerson, executive eirector of Florida Decides Healthcare, said in a prepared statement.
“While we don’t agree with every part of the ruling, today was a great day for our campaign and for Florida voters. We now have a clear and achievable path to get on the ballot.”
Groups must gather nearly 881,000 signatures from across the state by next February to make the 2026 ballot. So far, Smart & Safe Florida has gotten more than 613,000 signatures verified while Florida Decides Healthcare has gotten nearly 63,000 signatures verified.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
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This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2025.