League News and Publicity

Democracy Under Attack:

Defending the Citizen Initiative Process

Florida's elected representatives continue to devise measures to compromise our right to amend the state constitution. Florida's elected representatives who have sworn to uphold the Florida Constitution are working to take away our last check on government- the citizen initiative process.

The 1968 Florida Constitution gave the people the power to amend the constitution through the citizen initiative process. The constitution defines the method by which citizens can collect petition signatures to place a single issue on the ballot. Voters across the state then can vote "yes" or "no." It is not an easy process. Citizens must collect over 600,000 valid signatures from registered voters. But, the citizen initiative process remains the only democratic means whereby citizens can enact change when their elected representatives are unresponsive.

The first successful attempt to place a citizen initiative petition on the ballot occurred in 1976 with the Sunshine Amendment. It called for full financial disclosure by elected state and constitutional officers. Lawmakers reacted then, as now, by changing the rules and hampering the process.

In the ensuing years, citizens, frustrated by a Legislature apparently unwilling or unable to address specific concerns, increasingly resorted to the citizen initiative process to force the Legislature to deal with an issue. Albeit, some resulting petitions addressed issues that should more properly be dealt with by statutory law and are perhaps inappropriate for inclusion in Florida's basic law. A statutory citizen petition initiative process that is employed in 21 states would have equipped citizens with an alternate to a ballot approach to increase the minimum wage, ban workplace smoking and create a statewide university governance system. Since 1968, citizens followed the changing rules and placed 27 constitutional amendments on the ballot; 22 of these measures passed (82%).

In contrast, Tallahasee politicians placed twice as many constitutional amendments on the ballot. Voters approved 89% of their 53 proposals. Some of these legislative constitutional amendments restrict the ability of citizens to exercise their democratic right to petition the government. A 2004 legislative amendment moved the deadline for collecting initiative signatures from August to February. In the 2005 legislative session, the Legislature passed another initiative for the 2006 ballot to raise the threshold of passage for future citizen initiatives to a supermajority of the votes—60% of the electorate as opposed to 50% for a legislative amendment.

Politicians in Tallahassee appear to fear citizen initiatives as a means to dilute legislative power. In the 2003, 2004, 2005 and pending 2006 legislative session, the Florida Legislature has and is reviewing bills to discourage citizen petition initiatives. On Tuesday, the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee advanced proposals that, among other requirements, tightly regulate signature-gathers and fine those who fraudulently collect signatures. S 1244 is titled the Petition Fraud and Voting Protection Act although no fraud has been proven to exist with the current process.

The Senate Ethics and Elections Committee also revived a resolution (SB 26) that would ask voters this November to limit future citizen-driven amendments to subjects already in the Constitution. A laudatory move, perhaps, if they also create a statutory citizen initiative process.  In either case, the legislature can pass these bills without voter approval thereby denying citizens access to their government.

The Legislature has even discussed rewriting the entire Florida Constitution to move already-approved citizen initiatives into statutes—where they may be more easily changed or repealed eleven years earlier than the next scheduled Constitution Revision Committee in 2017.
Proponents of these bills, like the state Chamber of Commerce, tell citizen activists to exercise their right to vote their representatives out of office if they are unhappy.  But, with reapportionment controlled by the Legislature, voters face defacto disenfranchisement. (In the 2004 elections, 72% of incumbents standing for re-election had no major party competitor.)

Clearly our elected representatives are blatantly ignoring the will of the people. Just because politicians do not like the way people vote, Florida's citizenry should not be denied the power to determine the future of their own constitution. It is a document for the people and by the people. Rather, our elected representatives ought to concern themselves with representing their constituents.

The citizen initiative process is not broken. Florida's citizens want this process as a check on the government's power. Rather than respecting our rights as citizens, our elected representatives are working to curtail our access to democracy. That is not what we elected them to do.

Dianne Wheatley-Giliotti, President, League of Women Voters of Florida and member Save the Voters' Voice (15 February 2006)

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