Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has dispatched state election crimes investigators, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the state Attorney General’s Office to investigate marijuana-referendum petitions processed by the Broward Supervisor of Elections Office.
The team arrived at the elections headquarters in Fort Lauderdale on Monday and was still present on Tuesday, county Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said. He declined to discuss the number of investigators present or what they were doing. “I cannot talk about an ongoing criminal investigation.”
Letters to Scott from Secretary of State Cord Byrd, dated Saturday, and from the attorney general’s statewide prosecutor, dated Sunday, identified concerns about the verification of signatures on petitions seeking to get a statewide marijuana legalization referendum on the ballot this year.
Byrd’s letter said that his director of the Office of Election Crimes and Security reported to him that after a visit to the Broward elections headquarters on Friday to “audit” the petition verification process, there were “several matters of great concern that warrant further investigation and likely referral for criminal prosecution.”
Citing the Feb. 1 deadline for verifying the referendum petitions, Byrd wrote that it was “imperative that the concerns raised during the audit be addressed now” and told Scott that he was sending Office of Election Crimes staff back to Fort Lauderdale. “At my request, the Attorney General and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement will also be present to investigate and take any necessary action.”
The Byrd letter didn’t say who could be referred for prosecution.
The second letter, from statewide prosecutor Bradley R. McVay, was more specific, and outlined a focus on Smart & Safe Florida, which is leading the drive to get the marijuana issue on the ballot, and petition circulators who work with or are employed by the organization.
“We have reason to believe that a number of these petitions contain forged signatures or are otherwise fraudulent in nature, likely containing stolen voter personal identifiable information. Given the volume — potentially hundreds of Florida victims — my office intends to act fast,” McVay wrote.
He said he ordered two prosecutors to the supervisor’s office to work alongside two FDLE agents and the staff from the Office of Election Crimes.
Taking the two letters together, Scott said Smart & Safe Florida and its petition circulators are the focus of the state action — not him or his office. A spokesperson for Smart & Safe Florida declined to comment.
“The letter (from Byrd) is vague about exactly what they are investigating,” Scott said. The second letter, from the statewide prosecutor, “provided a lot of clarity.”
Scott said multiple elements in Byrd’s letter that describe the operations of his office are false, misleading or grossly out of context.
“It is just incredibly frivolous and petty. And that’s how it starts and goes on from there,” Scott said. “When you get to his paragraph saying we were generally disorganized, some of it is inaccurate, some of it is unfair. … We don’t understand where he’s coming from. It’s just totally unfair criticisms.”
Scott said he has seen no “indication that this office or anyone who works for this office is under investigation.”
He also said he did not view the presence of investigators or statements in the secretary of state’s letter as setting the stage for the Republican governor to suspend him from office. “No, I don’t have any reason to believe that,” he said.
Scott, a Democrat, was elected to his position by Broward voters in 2020 and reelected in 2024. After his first election, Scott worked closely through the transition with Peter Antonacci, who had been the county’s appointed supervisor of elections and was later DeSantis’ first appointee to lead the election crimes offices. Antonacci died in 2022.
A majority of the state’s counties have had audit visits from the Office of Election Crimes and Security to see how petition verifications are being handled, said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link, who is also president of Florida Supervisors of Elections, the professional association of the state’s 67 elected county supervisors.
They are typically routine, spot checks; the audit visit in Palm Beach County last week lasted about an hour, Link said, not the intense examination that’s taking place in Broward. “I have not heard of any other county other than Broward that’s had this.”
DeSantis’ opposition
The proposed referendum would amend the Florida Constitution to legalize recreational use of marijuana by people over 21.
DeSantis is a vociferous opponent of the idea, and was the most prominent opponent of a similar 2024 referendum effort. It received a majority of the vote — 55.9% yes; 44.1% no — but failed because it didn’t reach the 60% threshold required for passage. The most prominent Florida voter, President Donald Trump, said at the time he would vote yes.
In 2025 and this year, the Secretary of State’s Office — Byrd is a DeSantis appointee — has issued multiple rulings that collectively have the effect of reducing the number of verified petition signatures and have slowed the process. The sponsors have to have 880,062 verified petitions by the Feb. 1 deadline. As of Tuesday, the Division of Elections reported there were 760,002.
Attorney General James Uthmeier — whose statewide prosecutor is involved in the effort — was appointed to the job by DeSantis last year after serving as the governor’s chief of staff and campaign manager for DeSantis’ unsuccessful candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
While he was DeSantis’ top aide, he was a central player in the effort that ended up in defeat of the 2024 marijuana referendum. In his current official role as attorney general, Uthmeier has urged the Florida Supreme Court to not allow the 2026 marijuana referendum on the ballot.
The Supreme Court is involved because it is responsible for approving the proposed ballot measure, reviewing issues whether proposed constitutional amendments are limited to single subjects and whether the proposed ballot language is clear.
Scott said that as an election administrator he has no position on the marijuana referendum issue, but said the state is obviously opposed.
“When you look at everything that has happened over the last few months, I think that they have made it clear where they stand on this petition, and they are working very, very hard to discredit the process and the people who are doing this,” he said, adding he’s not judging if their objections are justified or not. “I’m just saying it is clear that is what they are doing, that they are opposed,” Scott said.
Byrd’s spokesperson didn’t immediately reply to questions on Tuesday.
Specifics
Byrd raised, and Scott refuted, several issues.
For example, Byrd said his first concern was that petitions verified by Scott’s office “were missing” required information. For example, he wrote, at least one petition verified valid was missing the signature of the petition circulator who collected the form.
Scott’s office has reviewed about 115,000 petitions, 70,000 of which his office has verified and 45,000 which are invalid, largely because of state regulations. He said there were four instances in which the space for the petition circulator’s name was blank — the first issue cited in Byrd’s letter — an error rate Scott described as miniscule.
“To think that there won’t be any human error in this process is just totally unreasonable,” Scott said.
Byrd also suggested Scott’s office was derelict in sending notices to voters whose signatures on marijuana petitions were verified.
A state law that went into effect Oct. 1 requires supervisors of elections to send a letter to each person whose signature on a referendum petition is verified.
It notifies the voter that their signature has been verified. The mailing must also include a pre-addressed, postage-paid form that a voter can use to alert the DeSantis-controlled Office of Election Crimes and Security in Tallahassee if they believe their signature was obtained fraudulently.
Byrd’s letter states that Scott’s office didn’t send out “the bulk of notices” until January, based on what “your staff indicated.” Scott said his office sent out the first batch of required notices in December, weeks before Byrd’s letter suggested — “we have receipts” to prove it — and the Broward mailings went out before some other counties issued theirs.
He said state auditors were given that information on Friday, the day before Byrd sent his letter. “They’re taking a comment from a staffer who he doesn’t even identify, and he’s using it to draw conclusions that are false,” Scott said.
Byrd also said the Office of Election Crimes “identified a general lack of organization” in the Broward office, discovered verified petitions with signatures that “looked nothing like any of the voter’s signatures in your voter registration records. For example, the signatures in the voter’s registration record were shapes or lines and the signature on the petition was a full name in cursive,” and “several instances of the same handwriting occurring over multiple petitions from purportedly different voters.”
Scott said his office “has done a very good job in processing these petitions in what was actually an exceptionally difficult year,” citing “sweeping changes” to state law that went into effect last year and implementation of a new voter registration system in September. “I think the criticism that we were disorganized was from the fact that we were trying to figure out how to do things for the first time,” he said.
The two-page letter from McVay, the statewide prosecutor, was focused entirely on organizers of the petition effort, including “whether Smart & Safe Florida violated any criminal laws by knowingly submitting fraudulent petitions to election officials.”
He wrote that “we believe 27 of the Smart & Safe Florida circulators who were terminated for petition fraud” — and who are currently “subjects of active criminal investigations” — had petitions submitted to Scott’s office, which invalidated about 535 and validated about 302.
McVay also asked for any records about “petitions that were submitted by Smart & Safe Florida for which the signature on the petition is associated with a voter who was deceased at the date of the purported signature.” McVay’s letter didn’t say if his office suspected petitions signed by supposedly dead voters had been verified or were rejected.
Political writer Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.
