Marriage amendment backers hold breath
They find out today if the proposal made it on the November ballot.
By Jeff Brumley, The Times-Union
Supporters collected more than four times the additional signatures they needed by Friday's deadline, but that doesn't guarantee the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment will be on the November ballot.
What it does mean is that those supporters will be holding their breath until this afternoon, when the Florida Department of State is expected to announce which proposed amendments made it and which didn't.
One amendment activist, Orlando lawyer Mat Staver, said organizers may take legal action if the measure doesn't make it onto the ballot.
"It's a mess, it's a mess," said Orlando lawyer John Stemberger, chairman of Florida4Marriage.org, the coalition of religious groups promoting the effort to constitutionally ban same-sex marriage in Florida.
They collected approximately 92,000 additional signatures by the deadline when they needed only about 22,000. But the amendment will be on the ballot only if the state's 67 supervisors of election were able and willing to verify the validity of those signatures by 5 p.m. Friday, Stemberger said.
The petition process became messy for supporters in mid-January when a state review uncovered a 22,000-signature deficit for the amendment, which required a minimum of 611,009 signatures for ballot placement.
That news sent supporters - who had celebrated the completion of their petition campaign in December - scrambling for more signatures before the Feb. 1 deadline.
"It's pretty remarkable" that four times the number of needed signatures were collected so quickly, Stemberger said. "But now the real challenge is whether the supervisors [of elections] will count them."
State law says that the counties have 30 days to verify the validity of signatures - even if a deadline looms well before that, said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for the Florida Department of State.
Some counties reported they wouldn't get to the signatures for weeks, Stemberger said, while others had promised to process them before 5 p.m. Friday.
In Jacksonville, election workers on Friday had approximately 14,000 signatures to count ahead of the 5,400 marriage amendment signatures turned in on Thursday, said Jerry Holland, supervisor of elections for Duval County. In his office, signatures are counted on a first-come, first-serve basis.
By 5 p.m. Friday, 10,465 signatures were uncounted, including 4,476 of those supporting the marriage amendment, Holland said.
Supporters of the amendment said they aren't happy with the way some of the counties are handling the matter.
"I think, whenever they get a petition, they ought to count it," said Staver, chairman and founder of the Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal advocacy group and one of the amendment campaign leaders. "If they sit on them, that will result in some legal action."
If the amendment fails to make it onto the November ballot, the signatures already collected will be valid for the 2010 election, Ivey said.
Amendment opponents are proceeding as if the measure will be on November's ballot, said Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, a statewide gay rights group.
They'll continue to campaign on the message that unmarried heterosexual couples will be hurt by the amendment as much as same-sex couples. Floridians may begin to see and hear television and radio commercials opposing the amendment as the election nears, Smith said.
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