TALLAHASSEE — Nearly every spring the same battle plays out in the Florida Legislature over citizen-driven ballot initiatives, those measures that over the years asked voters whether to protect abortion rights, legalize marijuana or shrink public school class sizes.

Republicans and business leaders come up with ways to make it harder to get proposals on the ballot, arguing those hurdles are needed to improve election integrity, fight fraud and stop the influence of outside corporations.

Democrats and voting rights groups fight those measures, saying they limit access to the ballot and cripple direct democracy, something that has existed in Florida since 1886 — the year Thomas Edison moved to Fort Myers.

This year is no different. Opponents of ballot initiatives, who include Gov. Ron DeSantis, are pushing legislation to make Florida’s version of direct democracy almost undoable.

“This is a blatant attack on direct democracy,” said Quinn Diaz, the public policy associate for Equality Florida. “It is a clear dismantling of the public petition process.”

Another constant battle supporters of ballot initiatives face: lawmakers watering down or complicating successful amendments. In past years, they loosened rules on class-size caps, created a complicated licensing scheme for medical marijuana purveyors and required felons to pay their court-ordered fees and fines before they could vote again.

Republican lawmakers this year are moving a bill that creates a loophole for businesses so they do not need to pay minimum wage to younger workers they classify as interns, an effort to scale back what voters approved in 2020.

“At the end of the day it’s that conflict between we the people and we the politicians,” said Desmond Meade, a former homeless person and convicted felon who led the successful drive in 2018 to amend the constitution to restore felons’ voter rights. “The petition process is a fail-safe to democracy. It allows citizens to take matters into their own hands.”

Florida is one of the few states that has a mechanism to let voters decide a broad band of policy issues, often ones the Legislature refused to touch.

Among those adopted in recent decades: building a high-speed rail, imposing a mandatory statewide minimum wage, restoring the voting rights for felons, banning offshore drilling and prohibiting the “cruel and unusual” confinement of pregnant pigs.

Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and a formerly incarcerated person, holds a number of petitions before a press conference Monday, August 1, 2016 in front of the Orange County Supervisor of Elections Office about restoring voting rights to felons who have completed their prison sentences. Meade led the successful drive to get a voting rights amendment on the 2018 ballot. (Red Huber/ Staff Photographer)

Florida’s 1885 constitution required voter approval for all constitutional amendments beginning in 1886. In 1968, Florida voters approved an amendment that laid out a system that allowed citizens to place amendments on the ballot using the initiative process of gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures from residents in at least half the congressional districts in Florida and getting them certified by the state.

The Legislature has been trying to curtail that practice ever since, saying that outside special interests with money have corrupted the process.

The petition process “is not a privilege, it is a fundamental right enshrined in our constitution,” said Debbie Chandler, co-chair of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

“When legislators fail, people themselves can step in to make change,” Chandler said. “The Legislature has systematically made it harder, more burdensome and more expensive. To make the process harder is not a reform, it’s a suppression.”

Rich Templin, legislative and political director for the ACLU of Florida, said since 2004,146 bills have been filed to make the petition process harder.

“Sixteen have passed … and each change made the process more expensive,” he said.

In 2005, the Legislature moved up the deadline for submitting petitions by six months. The next year, the Legislature placed a Chamber of Commerce-backed amendment on the ballot to raise the voter threshold for approving amendments from 50% plus one to 60%. It passed with only 58% of the vote.

In 2019, the Legislature approved a sweeping overhaul that banned paying petition gatherers per signature, among other things, and also required petition gatherers to register with the Secretary of State.

Over the years, the Legislature also imposed an expiration date for petition signatures and then shortened its lifespan from eight years to four years to two years.

This year, a bill by the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee drafted by Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, would make even more dramatic restrictions on the petition process.

Grall cited an investigation by the Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security that alleged fraud in thousands of signatures for Amendment 4, which would have restored abortion rights in a state that now mostly bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy.

Democrats said the report was an attempt to intimidate voters, smear the Amendment 4 campaign and provide a basis for challenging it in court, if it passed. It won 57% of the vote, short of the 60% needed.

Grall’s bill would cut the deadline for submitting signed petitions from 30 days to 10 days after the signature is received, increase the fines against petition gatherers for late filing by 100-fold in some cases, impose $1 million bonds on organizations that want to start petition campaigns and charge them $50,000 for violations by their petition gatherers.

And ordinary citizens who sign those petitions would have to provide more personal information than currently required. They would also be limited to submitting just two petitions – one for themselves and one for a family member, regardless of the size of their family. If they are found in possession of more than two signed petitions they could face felony charges.

“These measures will increase election integrity,” Grall said. “We should all care about this.”

Meade understands the reasoning behind the bill, but “it undermines the spirit of democracy. This legislation creates a huge barrier for citizens,” he said.

“I would understand if they placed some of these same barriers in front of politicians, in the spirit of fairness,” Meade said. “Make candidates post a $1 million bond, especially if the underlying reason is to respect democracy and the integrity of elections.”

When Floridians for a Fair Democracy started its campaign to restore voting rights for felons in 2014, the organization had no money, Meade said. “We were a grassroots movement. There was no way we could have posted a $1 million bond without any funding.”

It took the organization nearly three years to raise its first $1 million, a fraction of the amount needed to collect the nearly 800,000 signatures to get on the ballot.

Eventually, the organization got the attention of philanthropists, social welfare organizations and most of all the American Civil Liberties Union, and raised $24 million. Most of that went to a nationwide petition consulting firm out of California that ran the campaign.

Meade said the proposals being recommended this session “will make it more likely that only big money interests will be able to launch initiatives.”