By Christine Sexton, Florida Phoenix
Saying the state’s new limits on ballot initiatives were too great to overcome immediately, Florida Decides Healthcare announced Thursday that it is putting the brakes on efforts to get a proposed constitutional amendment on Medicaid expansion on the 2026 ballot and will aim for 2028 instead.
Related: Up, up, and away: 2026 health insurance premiums set to double for millions of Floridians.
In an interview with the Florida Phoenix, organization Executive Director Mitch Emerson said the new law was passed to sabotage efforts to bring proposed constitutional amendments before voters. The Florida Legislature earlier this year passed HB 1205, which put in sweeping changes nearly immediately.
“As much as anything, it’s really about runway,” Emerson said, adding that the law changed the rules in the middle of the signature campaign effort.
Florida Decides Healthcare, the political entity created to place Medicaid expansion on the 2026 ballot, challenged many of the changes in federal court, but an appeals court earlier this month lifted an injunction against one of the restrictions that prevented groups from using non-citizens to gather initiative petitions.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature insisted that the restrictions were needed to counter fraud in which people were arrested for turning in petitions that contained the names of dead people or people who never signed them.
Despite the new restrictions, Florida Decides collected 200,000 petitions, raised more than $6 million, and built a coalition of more than 100 grassroots organizations. In the meantime, Emerson said, it remains committed to its lawsuit against HB 1205, with a full trial scheduled for January. And it’s committed to a three-year plan to set the issue before voters in the 2028 general election.
“We’re going to keep moving forward. We’ve got a plan to expand the coalition in every county, raise the resources, and organize at the scale needed to overcome the barriers that politicians are putting out in our way. And over the next three years, we are going to build the biggest, strongest campaign Florida has ever seen,” he said, adding that a GSG poll show 67% of Floridians support Medicaid expansion.
