The lawsuit was filed by liberal organizations including Florida Decides Healthcare, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Elias Law Group, which frequently represents Democratic groups and candidates.
The filing came soon after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed new restrictions into law.
Under the new law, voters could be charged with a felony if they collect more than 25 signed ballot petitions, other than their own or those of immediate family members. They must also register with the state as a petition circulator.
Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Florida-based Liberty Counsel, tells AFN the legislature is in the right while the people behind the lawsuit lack the legal basis to contest the new law.
"We've had a problem with the Florida initiative and that was pretty evident when we had Amendment 4, which is the abortion amendment that failed last year in 2024," says Staver.
The ballot measure, which needed 60% to pass, barely missed that hurdle with 57% supporting it. If passed, it would have provided a constitutional right to abortion in red-state Florida.
What the pro-life community discovered, he says, is lots of out-of-state money poured into Florida to change its state constitution from special interest groups that were promoting the pro-abortion side.
Staver adds that individuals, including people with criminal records, were hired to gather signatures, and some of them were getting paid as an incentive by how many signatures they gathered.
"As a result, many of these signatures were fraudulent,” Staver recalls. “They were duplicates of others and some of those were individuals who were dead.”
