Reforming the Citizen Initiative Process
In recent elections voters have had to confront a barrage of amendments that have made it to the ballot through the citizen initiative process.
This troubling trend has led members of the Legislature to examine ways of reforming the process, so that our state’s top document is protected from provisions that don’t belong there, while also protecting citizens’ fundamental right to change their system of governance.
In November of 2004, Floridians approved the first of the initiative reform amendments. Now, a citizen initiative must receive the requisite number of petition signatures by February 1 of the year it is to appear on the ballot.
That initial reform has already borne fruit. As a result of the 2004 reforms, only two citizen’s initiatives were successful in meeting the February 1 deadline. No other citizens’ initiatives will be allowed on the 2006 ballot.
A joint resolution passed last year, which will appear before voters in November, requires that a constitutional amendment proposed by any citizen initiative must gain at least 60 percent of the votes cast on the amendment; currently adoption of an initiative requires a simple majority vote.
In 2006, three major constitutional reform efforts are underway. The first is a Senate proposal that would institute a filter limiting the subjects that citizen initiative can address. In essence citizen’s initiatives would be limited to those that change the basic structure of government.
The second joint resolution is the product of the House Judiciary Committee, known as ‘no hidden tax,’ will prevent the imposition of onerous, costly, and unnecessary programs through constitutional mandates. Recent amendments such as class-size limits, the net-ban, and the ill-conceived high-speed rail would have fallen under this provision, which would have required them to be enacted by a much higher margin.
Another proposal in the works is the streamlining or revision of Florida’s Constitution. This legislation is being spearheaded by Senate Judiciary Chairman Dan Webster (R-Winter Garden) and supported by his counterpart in the House, Rep. David Simmons (R-Altamonte Springs). If passed, the plan would ask voters to approve the removal of certain obsolete language and grammatical errors. In addition, it would transfer the pregnant pigs amendment to statute. The goal of the sponsors is to ‘purify’ Florida’s Constitution and submit a clean document that the state can be proud of. Originally, it was thought that the sponsors would push for the removal and subsequent codification of recent, unpopular amendments into statute. |
