An effort to place a statewide initiative to legalize sports betting and event wagers on this year’s ballot folded in January after initiative backers acknowledged they lacked the needed signatures to get the measure before voters.
Florida Education Champions (FEC), with financial backing of sportsbook operators FanDuel and DraftKings, last year launched a signature-gathering campaign to get the proposal on the 2022 ballot. The initiative would have allowed sports betting at professional sports venues and pari-mutuels as well as by American Indian tribes with Florida gaming pacts.
The measure would have allowed the state legislature to tax betting revenues and earmark the tax funds to the state’s Education Enhancement Trust Fund. Only those 21 years and older would have been allowed to engage in such wagering, according to the proposal’s text.
The total votes needed statewide to qualify the measure for the ballot was 891,589, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, but FEC organizers collected just 514,888. Florida’s initiative rules also require that sponsors collect a certain level of signatures (8% of the number of votes cast in the last presidential vote) in at least 14 of the state’s 27 congressional districts.
Christina Johnson, the FEC spokeswoman, said the group appreciated the support it received from hundreds of thousands of supporters around the state.
“We will be considering all options in the months ahead to ensure that Floridians have the opportunity to bring safe and legal sports betting to the state, along with hundreds of millions of dollars annually to support public education,” Johnson said in a statement emailed to the Florida Record.
Supporters of the initiative faced multiple challenges in signature gathering, according to Johnson.
“While pursuing our mission to add sports betting to the ballot we ran into some serious challenges, but most of all the COVID surge decimated our operations and ability to collect in-person signatures,” she said.
Supporters won’t be able to attempt to put the measure before voters again until 2024. This suggests that the efforts to allow sports betting in Florida will shift to a federal appeals court, which is considering a lower court’s decision to invalidate the Seminole Tribe’s online sports betting compact.
Betting that would have been authorized by the initiative included wagers on any type of sporting events, individual athletic performances or statistics, pools and motor racing.