Cord Byrd, an appointee of legalization opponent Gov. Ron DeSantis, sent a memo to the media at 6:41 p.m. Sunday, an hour and 41 minutes after the deadline for submitting petition signatures for the 2026 ballot had passed. His memo said all 22 proposed constitutional amendments, including the marijuana one, failed to meet the state requirements to get on this year’s ballot.

Not so fast, said the Smart & Safe Florida organization pushing the marijuana measure: It submitted more than 1.4 million signatures, about 60 percent over the required number, said Glenn Burhans Jr., general counsel for the group. Once they are all counted, he said, “we will have more than enough to make ballot.”

“We believe the declaration by the Secretary of State is premature, as the final and complete county-by-county totals for validated petitions are not yet reported,” Burhans said via text.

State law says all signatures validated by 5 p.m. Feb. 1 must be counted.

State elections officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The dispute is only the latest sharp conflict over qualifying the initiative, a process that began almost immediately after a previous ballot measure failed in 2024. After tightening the rules governing petitions, DeSantis and his allies have fought at every turn to block the proposed 2026 measure’s path to the ballot.

Smart & Safe Florida is the group pushing to legalize marijuana and came close two years ago when about 56% of voters said yes to making it legal. The state requires 60% voter approval, however, to approve a constitutional amendment.

DeSantis and Attorney General James Uthmeier are opposed to legalizing marijuana and worked to thwart the 2024 ballot amendment using more than $30 million in state resources. That money included a $10 million donation to Hope Florida — the charity that is the pet project of First Lady Casey DeSantis — that wound up in the coffers of two political committees opposed to its passage.

Uthmeier, a central figure in the defeat of that amendment two years ago, reacted to Byrd’s announcement on social media with a “You Hate to See it!” written over an old Looney Tunes logo.

The state requires 880,062 valid signatures to reserve a spot on the November general ballot. The Department of State’s website shows 783,592 valid petitions after Byrd tossed out some 70,000 petitions.

Safe & Smart faced fresh challenges and increased costs associated to get the measure on this year’s ballot, thanks to a new law that imposed more restrictions and tighter deadlines for petition gathering.

The group also claims Byrd effectively slowed down the verification process when his office sent a memo out to all 67 county election supervisors, copied to Uthmeier. The memo said election supervisors had to verify petition signatures, then send a letter to each person whose signature was verified and do it “on the same day,” if possible, language that is not in state law.

Election supervisors in Central Florida, and around the state, reported the new rule confused voters.

Byrd also sent members of his Office of Election Crimes and Security to Orange and Broward counties to audit marijuana ballot petitions.

A spokesman for Orange County Supervisor of Elections Karen Castor Dentel confirmed the office received an email “regarding a particular subset of the marijuana-referendum petitions earlier this month. We also had a visit from the Office of Election Crimes and Security last week to audit the referenced petitions in-person. “

Smart & Safe and other groups challenged some of Florida’s new petition rules in court but were not successful.

The group said it would have met the signature threshold if the state hadn’t rejected close to 300,000 signatures — all of them based on technicalities.

The state tossed out 200,000 on the basis that they didn’t include the full text of the amendment, which Smart & Safe Florida chose not to challenge because it was running out of time.

The group did challenge Byrd’s decision to invalidate 42,000 signatures by people classified as “inactive” voters and nearly 29,000 signatures collected by workers who are not Florida residents.

A Leon Circuit Judge ruled the petitions by inactive voters shouldn’t be invalidated but said the state was right to invalidate the petitions gathered by non-residents. An appeals court overturned the ruling on inactive voters and let the ruling on non-residents stand.

Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said the DeSantis administration is deliberately trying to silence voters.

“We’ve seen this governor not only create his own police force to intimidate voters who participate in petition initiatives, but also steal millions of state dollars from children and families to control the outcome of elections,” Fried said in a news release. “Now they’re denying ballot access while redrawing maps to favor the Republican Party, because they’ve seen how Democrats have performed since Trump has taken office.”

More than seven decades later, the 79-year-old Sanford grandfather – still a man without a country – found himself in legal limbo in the Alligator Alcatraz detention camp in the Everglades, picked up on a decades-old deportation order authorities had previously chosen not to enforce.

Bojerski’s case is complex and unusual – the most bizarre one his immigration attorney says he has handled in 30 years – but also part of the Trump administration’s widespread effort to deport millions of immigrants who it claims lack legal standing to be in the U.S, even those who lived here for decades with full knowledge of immigration officials.

The retired optician, taken into custody late last month, was recently moved to the Krome Detention Center in Miami and has a bond hearing on Nov. 18. His family worries his health is failing while he’s in custody and fears for his future.

“It’s devastating,” said his stepdaughter, Sandy Adams, 57.

Adams has moved in with her 82-year-old mother, who has been rocked by her husband’s incarceration. “It’s difficult to see her go through so much. She just sits by the phone, waiting for my Dad to call.”

ICE has offered no comments in response to questions from the Orlando Sentinel about Bojerski’s case.

Upon arriving in the U.S., Bojerski’s family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, which is where he grew up. But he did not become a citizen as a child for reasons that are not clear. Run-ins with the law led to a later deportation order, but it was not acted upon. His attempts to establish permanent residency also failed.

So he remained in the U.S., checking in with immigration officials when required.

In July, Bojerski went to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office for what he thought would be his usual routine visit. There he was told that if he didn’t voluntarily leave the country, ICE would deport him.

He was instructed to return to the ICE office in Orlando Oct. 30 with travel arrangements. But he could not make such plans as he has no passport and no country to return to, his lawyer said.

So he and six other relatives gathered at a Bahama Breeze restaurant in Sanford in late October for one last meal together before he had to report to ICE.

“At dinner, we laughed, told old stories, and just caught up on life,” Adams said. “I think every single one of us was somber inside, but we would not allow my dad to see it or feel it. We needed him to see us strong to help him remain strong.”

Bojerski attended the Oct. 30 meeting, then came out and told his wife he was being taken into custody pending a deportation hearing.

“He had been in there a long time and finally came out and said they’re deporting me and I just lost it,” said Gayle Bojerski, his wife of 37 years. “This was so unexpected.”

Since his eight-hour bus ride to Alligator Alcatraz, Bojerski’s health has gone downhill, his family said.

Prior to his incarceration he was able to walk on his own without assistance, but he is now using a wheelchair, Adams said. He has had three back surgeries for which he’s under continued medical care and was scheduled for a spinal procedure on Thursday, which he missed because of the detention. He has also been unable to get his regular medications.

Friday morning, he called to say he has bruises from the guards, Adams said.

“He fell out of his wheelchair and they left him on the cell floor for hours.” she said.

He told his family the detainees rarely get hot meals, a complaint shared by others held at Alligator Alcatraz.

Still, while he was at Alligator Alcatraz, Bojerski called his wife and stepdaughter daily. Now that he’s in Krome, the calls are less frequent because of the long lines to use the phone, they said.

“His phone calls are what keeps me going…as long as I can hear from him I know he’s OK,” his wife said.

Families and immigrant advocates have confirmed the unsafe, “inhumane” and unhygienic conditions at Alligator Alcatraz, including worm-infested food, overflowing toilets and lack of access to medical care.

State officials have disputed those descriptions.

David Stoller, Bojerski’s Orlando attorney, has sought to challenge his detention. His family has also reached out to U.S. Rep. Corey Mills, a Republican who represents Sanford, but to no avail.

Paul John Bojerski was born Zbigniew Janusz Bojerski  – a name he swore he never used during his lifetime in the U.S. – in a displaced persons camp in Lubec, Germany in October 1946 to Polish nationals.  The family emigrated to New York in January 1952, and he was admitted as a  lawful permanent resident under the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service records.

From there the story of his residency grows tangled.

He was arrested as a young man in 1966 for larceny and then again in 1967 for receiving stolen goods.

While he was incarcerated, an immigration hearing officer in 1968 ruled that those convictions were considered acts of moral turpitude that violated the country’s immigration laws. He ordered Bojerski to be deported.

But when both Poland, which was under communist rule at the time, and West Germany refused to take him, he was released from prison and remained in the United States.

Bojerski’s efforts to have the deportation order tossed out failed. Still, in 1969, immigration authorities issued another order that allowed him to be released from custody and apply for employment authorization, Stoller said.

Bojerski was in trouble with the law again after that, convicted in 1972 of rape and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released in 1975 and placed on parole for one year.

According to his wife, the rape charge was related to an incident at a fraternity party, where several other students sexually abused a young woman. Bojerski said he didn’t participate but was arrested along with the others. She said the other men took plea deals but he didn’t because he believed he did nothing wrong.

“He has never trusted the system since then,” Gayle Bojerski said.

After completing college Bojerski became an optician, working for the same company for more than 30 years. He eventually moved to Florida where he met Gayle in 1982, when she bought a pair of eyeglasses from him at the Montgomery Wards in Orlando.

Bojerski and Gayle married in 1988 and went to Niagara Falls in Canada on their honeymoon. Because he crossed the border then and again during a trip to Mexico, without questions from immigration officials, he and Stoller have argued that he had fulfilled the obligations of the old deportation order.

He made that case when he applied for permanent residency but immigration officials did not buy it. His request was denied, and in 2010 the government issued a new supervision order.

He has been following that order ever since, without issue, until July when the ICE told him he was to be kicked out of the country where he’s lived for over seven decades.

Whenever Bojerski calls, his family is his first priority, Adams said.

“Each call he asks about all of us first and keeps telling us he is OK.”

Gayle Bojerski said she is not opposed to the government’s deportation efforts as long as they focus on the most violent immigrants – drug dealers and other “bad people.”

But they shouldn’t deport the farmers who put food on our tables, she said, or people like her husband, despite his old criminal record.

“He’s always done everything they asked him to do,” she said.

The party leaders then voted to replace him with state GOP Vice Chair Evan Power, who lost to Ziegler for the top post a year ago.

Ziegler’s removal, done by a voice vote, was expected since the GOP executive committee unanimously stripped him of his duties, demanded he resign and reduced his pay to $1 on Dec. 17 in Orlando.

With the high-stakes presidential election and U.S. Senate and House seats coming up this year, officials said felt it was time to establish new leadership.

“Christian Ziegler has got to go. We’ve got to start the healing process. You can’t raise money in the party if you’ve got that much dysfunctional leadership,” CFO Jimmy Patronis said before the meeting.

An estimated 200 GOP members attended the closed-door meeting at the Tallahassee Conference Center. Only a few were opposed to dismissal.

Power won with 67% of the vote, 135-65.

He said he was eager to take the helm after months of uncertainty.

“There was a pause in what the party was doing because of that uncertainty,” Power said. “It’s not anything that’s going to have a long-term impact.”

Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, a former chair of the Florida GOP, said he’s known Power a long time and looked forward to “working with him as much as I can to get the party back on track.”

“There has been some harm done to the Republican Party of Florida that cannot be overcome without hard work,” Ingoglia said.

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans had called for his resignation, but Ziegler refused to do so, maintaining his innocence.

Power was up against attorney Peter Feaman, the National Committee chair for the state party for the last 12 years, and got a boost with an endorsement from DeSantis, who is fighting to hold onto second place in the Iowa caucuses to be held on Jan. 15.

Ziegler, 40, was a rising star in the GOP when an affidavit obtained by The Trident confirmed that police were investigating a claim that a woman who had previous sexual encounters with Ziegler and his wife had sexually assaulted her during a separate encounter.

Police said they discovered video footage of an October sexual encounter with the Zieglers that the victim claimed to have not consented to have recorded, which would be a violation of the state’s video voyeurism law. That, too, is under investigation. Ziegler has not been charged with any crime.

His wife is Bridget Ziegler, 41, a Sarasota County School Board member and co-founder of the Moms for Liberty, which has pushed for the removal of books with LGBTQ themes.

The Sarasota County School Board voted 4-1 to request her to resign, but she refused. The board has no power to remove her.

She also is one of five people DeSantis appointed to replace the Disney-connected Reedy Creek Special Improvement District with his own supporters on the newly created Central Florida Tourism Oversight Board.

Democrats have called the Zieglers hypocritical for embracing anti-LGBTQ views and yet appearing to participate in three-way sexual encounters.

The last major shakeup in the state Republican party came to a head in 2010 when party chair Jim Greer was indicted on fraud, theft and money laundering charges related to the party’s fundraising practices.

The party leaders then voted to replace him with state GOP Vice Chair Evan Power, who lost to Ziegler for the top post a year ago.

Ziegler’s removal, done by a voice vote, was expected since the GOP executive committee unanimously stripped him of his duties, demanded he resign and reduced his pay to $1 on Dec. 17 in Orlando.

With the high-stakes presidential election and U.S. Senate and House seats coming up this year, officials said felt it was time to establish new leadership.

“Christian Ziegler has got to go. We’ve got to start the healing process. You can’t raise money in the party if you’ve got that much dysfunctional leadership,” CFO Jimmy Patronis said before the meeting.

An estimated 200 GOP members attended the closed-door meeting at the Tallahassee Conference Center. Only a few were opposed to dismissal.

Power won with 67% of the vote, 135-65.

He said he was eager to take the helm after months of uncertainty.

“There was a pause in what the party was doing because of that uncertainty,” Power said. “It’s not anything that’s going to have a long-term impact.”

Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, a former chair of the Florida GOP, said he’s known Power a long time and looked forward to “working with him as much as I can to get the party back on track.”

“There has been some harm done to the Republican Party of Florida that cannot be overcome without hard work,” Ingoglia said.

U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans had called for his resignation, but Ziegler refused to do so, maintaining his innocence.

Power was up against attorney Peter Feaman, the National Committee chair for the state party for the last 12 years, and got a boost with an endorsement from DeSantis, who is fighting to hold onto second place in the Iowa caucuses to be held on Jan. 15.

Ziegler, 40, was a rising star in the GOP when an affidavit obtained by The Trident confirmed that police were investigating a claim that a woman who had previous sexual encounters with Ziegler and his wife had sexually assaulted her during a separate encounter.

Police said they discovered video footage of an October sexual encounter with the Zieglers that the victim claimed to have not consented to have recorded, which would be a violation of the state’s video voyeurism law. That, too, is under investigation. Ziegler has not been charged with any crime.

His wife is Bridget Ziegler, 41, a Sarasota County School Board member and co-founder of the Moms for Liberty, which has pushed for the removal of books with LGBTQ themes.

The Sarasota County School Board voted 4-1 to request her to resign, but she refused. The board has no power to remove her.

She also is one of five people DeSantis appointed to replace the Disney-connected Reedy Creek Special Improvement District with his own supporters on the newly created Central Florida Tourism Oversight Board.

Democrats have called the Zieglers hypocritical for embracing anti-LGBTQ views and yet appearing to participate in three-way sexual encounters.

The last major shakeup in the state Republican party came to a head in 2010 when party chair Jim Greer was indicted on fraud, theft and money laundering charges related to the party’s fundraising practices.