Opinion ID: 1572909
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Prerequisites and Limitations to Referenda

Text: The ballot summary is also misleading because it completely fails to mention the onerous preconditions that must be satisfied before a voter can make any attempt to obtain a referendum on a local-growth land-management plan change. Although the summary notes that ten percent of county or city voters must sign a Florida Growth Management Initiative Petition to obtain a referendum, the summary does not mention that the amendment requires a registered voter who desires a referendum to not merely sign and petition for relief, but to travel to his or her local elections office to sign the petition only in that location. Thus, under the amendment, individuals who seek a referendum may not set up a public kiosk at a local library, market, or government building where voters may sign the petition, as is the customary and traditional method of citizen involvement. Thus, a means that is commonly employed to obtain signatures for placement of an initiative amendment on the ballotsuch as the amendment filed by the sponsor in this caseis not available under this proposal. Although an elections office may be accessible to many citizens, this is clearly not the case for all. For example, a Florida voter living in a distant corner of a Florida county may be forced to travel hundreds of miles roundtrip to sign a petition that is housed at the County Supervisor of Elections Office located in a distant location. For a retired senior citizen who is living on a fixed income, or a citizen barely meeting expenses and feeding his or her family, an attempt to invoke this purported right to a referendum would consume both significant time and moneymoney that may not be available in these economically stressed timesas to be a practical impossibility. The ballot title and summary mention nothing of this onerous requirement and, in my opinion, clearly hide the ball with regard to a very significant and most uncommon aspect of the proposed amendment. A second limitation on the exercise of this so-called right to vote on growth-management plans that is omitted from the summary is the time limitation within which the required signatures must be acquired. Under the amendment, a referendum petition must be submitted to the County Supervisor of Elections or the City Clerk within sixty days from the date of the first signature on the petition. This sixty-day deadline is fixed regardless of the size of a city or county. Hence, under this proposed amendment, for there to ever be a referendum in Broward County on a growth-management plan, more than 103,000 registered voters [3] would need to travel to the Broward County elections office during a period of two months to sign a petition. Even if those offices were open seven days a week (which I assume they are not), an average of at least 1,717 signatures would need to be obtained per day for the required number of signatures to be collected within the sixty-day timeframea clearly unrealistic feat. The ballot summary in this case hides the ball because it fails to describe that such a restriction, which is mandated by the amendment, will render it virtually impossible for the right to vote on a land growth management plan to come to fruition. See generally Advisory Opinion to Attorney Gen. re Stop Early Release of Prisoners, 642 So.2d 724, 726-27 (Fla. 1994) (ballot summary that stated the proposed amendment ensures inmates would serve at least eighty-five percent of their sentences was inaccurate and seriously misleading for the failure to mention the pardon and clemency powers of the Governor and the Cabinet; Court concluded that the summary would  mislead[] voters into believing that the amendment is ironclad, when in fact it expressly leaves the Governor and Cabinet an easy, cheap, and relatively painless method of defeating the entire purpose stated in the summary  (emphasis supplied)).