A ballot initiative that would have left the decision to legalize sports wagering in Florida up to voters didn’t produce enough signatures to get on the 2022 ballot, supporters of the proposed constitutional amendment announced. As other states around the country start to legalize sports betting, Florida may have to wait until 2024 at the earliest.
Florida Education Champions, which sponsored the initiative backed by more than $37 million from industry leaders FanDuel and DraftKings, needed 891,599 verified signatures by Tuesday to get the proposed constitutional amendment, which called for instituting wagering online, at pari-mutuel facilities, casinos, stadiums and arenas, on the November ballot. As of Friday afternoon, the state Division of Elections had just 472,927 verified signatures.
“We are extremely encouraged by the level of support we saw from the more than one million Floridians who signed our petition and thank them for their efforts in wanting to bring safe and legal sports betting to Florida, while funding public education,” Florida Educations Champions spokeswoman Christina Johnson said.” While pursuing our mission to add sports betting to the ballot we ran into some serious challenges, but most of all the (COVID-19) surge decimated our operations and ability to collect in-person signatures.”
Another ballot initiative can’t be attempted until 2024. The state’s lone avenue to achieve authorization before then would be a new gaming compact between the state and the Seminole Tribe that would allow wagering on tribal lands.
In November, a federal judge invalidated the tribe’s compact that allowed for online and in-person gambling at its six casinos after owners of the Magic City Casino in Miami and Bonita Springs Poker Room filed a lawsuit challenging the compact. The suit argued the tribe’s hub-and-spoke model that allowed bettors to place wagers from anywhere in the state with servers on tribal land handling the wagers violated the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. The Department of the Interior, which allowed the initial compact, and the tribe, which rolled out the Hard Rock Sportsbook app in November before having to shut it down 22 days later, are appealing the decision.
