February 2, 2008:

The State of Florida Division of Elections alleges that the Florida Hometown Democracy Amendment has not qualified for the 2008 ballot.  We have submitted over 814,000 total petitions as of January 31, and have determined that many thousands of them were not reviewed in a timely fashion and are not included in the State’s totals.  We are confident that once all petitions that we have submitted are reviewed and counted, we will indeed qualify. We will continue to do everything in our power to ensure that all valid petitions are counted.

We thank the thousands of Floridians who have signed our petition, and extend special thanks to those supporters who collected petitions and donated their time and money to this important effort. 

Our petition drive has faced vicious developer opposition, including the running of a deceptive counter-petition, sponsored by the Florida Chamber of Commerce (which came nowhere close to qualifying), and an unprecedented, misleading revocation effort by a developer-backed PAC, “Save Our Constitution”.  We are challenging their revocation statute in court and await the court’s ruling. 

On December 31, 2007 a directive from the State Division of Elections was sent to the county Supervisors stating that they were not legally obligated to count all petitions submitted after that date (see attached memo).  Then, in early January, our opponents dumped many hundreds of thousands of petitions on the local Supervisors of Elections to clog up the petition review process.  This stunt, along with the re-scheduled Presidential Preference Primary election, ensured that all Florida Hometown Democracy petitions would not be reviewed and counted through our deadline of January 31, 2008.

We are confident that, despite the many diversions, deceptions and obstructions we have encountered, Florida Hometown Democracy will ultimately be on the ballot and in the Florida Constitution.