Florida Decides Healthcare has made the difficult decision to establish a new goal of ballot placement in the 2026 General Election. While the campaign and its stakeholders believe that there is an immediate need for Medicaid expansion in the State of Florida, recent statutory changes to the citizen initiative process have greatly increased the cost and complexity of qualifying for a spot on the ballot. Ultimately, to meet the petition submission deadline for the 2024 election cycle we estimate that the campaign would be required to spend just short of $10M on the petition circulation process alone. Given the limited amount of time before these major expenditures must occur, it has become unfortunately clear that for us to ensure the best possible path for a successful initiative we must focus our efforts on achieving ballot placement and a favorable electoral outcome in 2026. While there remains an immediate need for healthcare access for so many Floridians, this new goal will give us the ability to build the infrastructure and coalition necessary to ultimately pass this amendment and provide access to quality healthcare that Floridians deserve.
There’s still plenty that you can do right now to bring healthcare access to more than 800,000 Floridians! Click here to sign up for updates on how you can help put Medicaid expansion on the ballot in Florida.
What this means for petition collection:
Petitions for citizen initiatives in Florida are only valid from Feb. 1 of the election cycle preceding that in which the initiative is to be considered through Feb. 1 of the election year in which the initiative will be considered. This means that for an initiative in 2026, only petitions signed after Feb. 1, 2024 will count towards the required amount. The petitions collected thus far for our 2024 effort still potentially contain voter registration changes and will help to show the grassroots support behind expanding access to healthcare in our state. While we should not continue to collect petitions until 2024, please send what petitions have been collected so that we can ensure that they are still accounted for.
Please mail completed petitions to:
Florida Decides Healthcare
Post Office Box 10829 Tallahassee, FL 32302
Please sort petitions by county and submit them with our petition intake cover sheet. You can download and print copies of the coversheet using the link below.
What’s Next?
While our timeline may have changed, we are still working hard every day to make sure that voters are given the chance to decide the future of healthcare access in Florida. Your donations now will directly affect our ability to be successful in our next wave of petition collection. Please consider pitching in to bring Healthcare access to over 800,000 Floridians by clicking this link.
You can also sign up here to receive regular updates on the status of the campaign.
Questions?
Please contact us at floridadecideshealthcare@gmail.com if you have any questions!