Legislature’s shameless hypocrisy makes 2020 ballot amendments longer, more confusing | Editorial

As if your 2020 general election ballot wasn’t long and confusing enough, two of the Florida constitutional amendment questions are notable for big, bold, capital letters about the financial consequences if passed.

These screaming financial warnings aren’t on amendment No. 5 about expanding the homestead exemption for property taxes. They’re also absent from amendment No. 6 about extending property tax breaks to spouses of deceased combat veterans.

How odd. Tax breaks always carry some kind of financial price, and both 5 and 6 are estimated to cost local governments millions in the long run. That information’s just not on the ballot.

The difference here isn’t subtle. It’s purely political.

A new law passed last year dictates the bold-type financial warnings must go on questions that get on the ballot through citizen initiatives, where people go out and gather signatures to propose a constitutional change.

But questions placed on the ballot by the Florida Legislature — which happens far more often than citizen initiatives — are exempt from posting financial warnings, no matter what the cost might be.

In a fair world, ballot questions from the Legislature would have this statement in big, bold, capital letters, “THERE’S NO FINANCIAL WARNING ON THESE QUESTIONS BECAUSE FLORIDA LAWMAKERS ARE SHAMELESS HYPOCRITES.”

This year’s ballot proves it.

All four citizen initiatives have a summary of the financial impact statement in normal type, which can be up to 150 words. That’s double the maximum length of the statements before last year’s law — House Bill 5 — was passed. At 150 words, the financial statement can be twice the maximum length of the ballot question itself.

Doubling the length of the statement wasn’t enough for lawmakers. They included a mandate that, if a financial analysis found the amendment would increase costs or decrease revenue, or if that couldn’t be determined, the state had to slap yet another statement on the amendment saying so, only this one had to be in boldface type.

But they still weren’t finished. This year the Legislature tweaked the law to require putting the warnings in all-capital letters, as if someone were raging on Twitter.

That’s how we ended up with bold, all-caps warnings on two ballot initiatives — one to raise the statewide minimum wage and the other requiring two votes in two separate elections to change the constitution.

Supporters of the ballot changes argued last year that additional financial information would increase transparency and provide voters with more information.

Their argument would be far more persuasive if lawmakers hadn’t applied those principles exclusively to amendments proposed through citizen initiative, and exempted their own amendments from transparency.

(For those keeping score, Central Florida lawmakers who are on this year’s ballot and voted for this double standard are Republicans Scott Plakon, Rene Plasencia, Anthony Sabatini, David Smith and Josie Tomkow. Lawmakers who are on the ballot and voted against legislative hypocrisy are Democrats Randolph Bracy III, Anna Eskamani, Joy Goff-Marcil, Carlos Guillermo Smith, Linda Stewart, Geraldine Thompson and Victor Torres.)

This year’s overstuffed ballot language is just the latest in the Legislature’s years-long effort — enthusiastically backed by the Florida Chamber of Commerce — to stop regular Floridians from bypassing lawmakers and forcing constitutional changes onto the ballot.

One of the provisions of last year’s bill, the one that spawned all these extra words on this year’s ballot, also made it a crime to pay petition gatherers based on how many signatures they collect. Of course, the reason paid petition gatherers have become so important to citizen initiatives is partly because of other obstacles the Legislature erected in previous years.

Ironically, one of the two amendments with a bold-type, all-caps financial warning is amendment No. 3, which would force Floridians to vote twice in consecutive elections in order to approve future constitutional amendments. Luckily for No. 3, the warning only says the state couldn’t determine how much that one might cost.

No. 3 is the virtual death knell for citizen-led constitutional amendments in Florida. If it passes, there won’t be much need for those big, bold, all-caps financial warnings, because the Legislature will have gotten what it has wanted all along — a virtual monopoly on changing the Florida Constitution.

Editorials are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board and are written by one of its members or a designee. The editorial board consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick, David Whitley and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com

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