TALLAHASSEE (LifeSiteNews) — Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law on May 2 a measure to strengthen the rules governing signature collection for ballot initiatives, to prevent future abuse of the kind that was alleged to be behind last year’s failed attempt to liberalize the Sunshine State’s abortion laws.

HB 1205 requires petition sponsors to certify that no felons or non-citizens are involved in collecting petitions, orders that petition forms include the full text of a proposed amendment and require full identifying information for signers, forbids non-residents from working as petition circulators, mandates state training for petition gatherers, shortens the deadline for for delivering petitions to election supervisors, and more.

Those who sign the names of others or fill in missing information themselves are subject to fines of up to $5,000 per petition, and retaining a voter’s personal information is now a third-degree felony.

“This should have been done in January but House leadership blocked it,” DeSantis said. “Glad the Senate’s stronger version prevailed against attempts by the House leadership to water the reforms down.”

“Praise God!” said Florida Voice for the Unborn Executive Director Andrew Shirvell. “As a grassroots pro-life lobbying organization heavily involved in last November’s victory over the abortion industry’s proposed pro-abortion Amendment 4, Florida Voice for the Unborn was at the forefront of this year’s lengthy legislative battle to reform the initiative petition process.”

“It was truly disgusting, but unsurprising, to learn of the overwhelming amount of fraud and deception that the abortion industry perpetrated in order to collect the requisite number of signatures from Florida voters for its ghoulish abortion-until-birth state constitutional amendment,” he added.

Last year, the so-called “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion,” attempted to write into the Florida Constitution that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the [client’s] health, as determined by the [client’s] healthcare provider [i.e., abortionist].” It would have required abortion to be allowed for any reason before fetal “viability” and rendered post-“viability” bans effectively meaningless by exempting any abortion that an abortionist claims is for “health” reasons. If successful, it would have overturned all of the Sunshine State’s pro-life laws, including its heartbeat law banning most abortions starting around six weeks. 

Abortion allies across the country poured millions into the campaign, but with DeSantis leading a fight to defeat the amendment, it finished with 57 percent of the vote, short of Florida’s 60 percent threshold for amending its constitution. 

During the campaign, the DeSantis administration announced it would be looking into signatures from “nearly 37,000 submitted petitions” gathered by 35 individuals, following examples of the signatures of dead people and non-matching signatures, as well as reports from people who did “not sign the petition forms submitted in their names” and even forged signatures.

Last December, an interim report on the Florida Department of State (DOS) Office of Election Crimes & Security’s (OECS’s) investigation found, among other things, that the group behind the amendment, “Floridians Protecting Freedom” (FPF), relied primarily on the out-of-state PCI Consultants for signature collection, that the company has not cooperated with requests for information, that it has “become clear that a significant number of paid petition circulators used by FPF were known by FPF’s agents to be fraudsters before being utilized for petition gathering,” and that the circulators have been convicted of crimes so far.

“OECS has also levied fines against FPF for failing to timely deliver completed petition forms (or deliver them at all) to the Supervisor of Elections, in violation of Florida law,” it said. “To date, FPF has paid over $186,000 in civil penalties to OECS for violations of Florida’s election laws. A fine for $164,000 was recently paid to OECS by FPF pursuant to a settlement agreement in December 2024.”