By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Roxey Nelson wants a word with anybody who doesn’t care if Gov. Ron DeSantis gets the Legislature to help him make voter initiatives vanish.
DeSantis’s effort fizzled during last week’s special session, but the governor is expected to try again at the regular session starting March 4.
Nelson is executive vice president of Miramar-based 1199SEIU Florida, a union representing about 35,000 current and retired healthcare workers. She said that before the passage of Amendment 2, the voter-proposed minimum wage law, some employees of billion-dollar companies had to sleep in their cars.
On Nov. 3, 2020, 60.82 percent of Florida voters approved a stepped minimum wage schedule that will raise hourly salaries to $15 in 2026. Currently the legal minimum wage is $13 an hour, rising to $14 on Sept. 30. Starting in 2027, the law says, inflation will determine annual increases.
“What it’s done is raise wages for thousands and thousands of workers,” Nelson said. She said the average healthcare employee who was making $11 an hour is now making upwards of $17 or $18 due to the law and collective bargaining – “That’s massive.”
“Folks had always thought the public just didn’t care,” Nelson said. “When that law passed, it was hopeful, showing that economic justice issues they’ve been preaching about forever have taken hold.”
The Florida Constitution was amended to include a minimum wage guarantee after a lengthy and expensive signature-gathering effort bankrolled largely by John Morgan. The Orlando personal-injury lawyer also provided major funding for the medical marijuana ballot initiative item that failed in 2014 and passed in 2016.
DeSantis is leveraging the fact that it takes big bucks to successfully land a voters’ initiative. His call last month for a legislative special session included a trio of proposals focused on “strengthening the citizen’s initiative petition process.” In fact, their passage would make it next to impossible to pass them.
‘A BULLY GETS PANTSED’
Implementing that process and other new barriers would effectively end voter-led initiatives, Kara Gross of the Florida ACLU told the Tallahassee Democrat. “The governor’s proposal is designed to strip more power away from the people and to make it nearly impossible for Floridians to participate in their own government,” she said.
DeSantis’s spin: “Our constitution should not be for sale to the highest bidder,” he said before last week’s special session. On his agenda were immigration policing, property insurance and voter initiatives.
The Republican-run Legislature quickly tabled the voting matter. On Tuesday lawmakers defied the governor by passing their own, President Donald Trump-branded, immigration crackdown bill.
“A bully gets pantsed,” reporter Jason Garcia wrote in his Seeking Rents on Substack. DeSantis complained the competing bill was too weak and promised to veto it.
Still, DeSantis has plenty of allies who seem to agree with him that voter-led ballot measures are nothing more than threats to their authority. The Legislature started trying to weaken citizen initiatives not long after voters adopted this civil right in 1968.
Voters have passed 32 out of 42 citizen-proposed laws. In addition to medical marijuana and the minimum wage, they supported universal pre-kindergarten, natural-resource conservation and other progressive causes.
“Floridians have achieved those victories despite the fact that the Florida Legislature has constantly tried to stymie the citizen initiative process by making it more complicated and costlier,” according to the ACLU.
FELON VOTING BACKLASH
Legislative efforts to suppress voters’ ballot initiatives accelerated as a backlash against Amendment 4 of 2018, which was supposed to restore voting rights to an estimated 1.4 million felons who’d completed their sentences. Later legislators added requirements that felons must also pay off all court-ordered fines and restitution before they could legally vote.
Their advocates sued in federal court and lost in 2020 at the 11th Circuit appeals court in Atlanta. In 2023 DeSantis launched an election-fraud police force to arrest felons who voted but hadn’t paid their fines or court-ordered restitution. Many are so afraid of prison, they don’t even try to vote, according to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.
Former real estate professional Rosemary McCoy of Jacksonville was convicted in 2015 of charges related to illegally renting homes. After serving her sentence, she worked a minimum-wage job circulating petitions for Amendment 4. She was delighted when it passed.
But she owed $7,000 in restitution she couldn’t pay, meaning she couldn’t vote, McCoy tearfully told Florida Bulldog in August 2019.
“The public was unaware that this was happening to us. The public honestly thought that once you completed your sentence, it was over,” McCoy said. “They believed that all your rights would be restored.”
Last year DeSantis went to extreme lengths to defeat voter-backed ballot initiative measures that would have affirmed women’s reproductive rights and legalized recreational marijuana. Citing medical and educational concerns, he diverted an estimated $18 million in taxpayer dollars to a marketing campaign against the two proposed amendments.
When the votes were counted, both won majorities – 57 percent for reproductive rights and 56 percent for recreational marijuana – yet failed because they fell short of the 60 percent needed for approval under Florida’s Constitution.
‘REFORM’ OR ‘RIGGING’ SYSTEM
“We will not give up or stand down. The lives of women and girls across Florida depend on us continuing this work,” Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the Florida ACLU, said in a statement.
So DeSantis may have decided it would be easier to eliminate the voter-led ballot initiative process altogether. That would explain his determination to “reform” the system with
the Legislature’s cooperation this year.
“They are using the power and control they have to rig the system so they don’t have to deal with reality,” said Nelson, the union leader. “Floridians want them to deal with economic justice issues, that’s what they care about, and those are the things that the Legislature doesn’t want to deal with.”
The minimum wage proposal became law in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when the plight of healthcare workers resonated with the general public.
Nelson was asked whether advocates could push a similar law over the finish line today.
“I don’t want to be naive, that would be a hill to climb that I think would be too high. That would probably make it impossible,” she said. “But I hate saying that because I think when people are determined to protect their right to exist, their loved ones, their self-determination … I think people will work miracles.”
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