Sports Betting Proposal Falls Almost Half A Million Signatures Short Of Goal

Tallahassee, FL – Florida residents won’t get to vote on the legalization of sports betting after the proposed constitutional amendment fell almost half a million signatures short of its goal. As of Friday (Jan. 28), the amendment garnered 472,927 signatures, missing the target goal of 900,000 signatures by February 1. The measure aimed to authorize sports betting at professional sports venues and through online platforms.  Online gambling companies FanDuel and DraftKings were major supporters of the bill, with both companies contributing a grand total of $37.2 million to the cause—$14.5 million came from FanDuel and the remaining $22.7 came from DraftKings. Florida Education Champions, the committee sponsoring the bill, released a statement on Friday and blamed the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, more specifically the omicron variant, as the reason why they didn’t reach their target goal. “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,” wrote Committee Spokesperson Christina Johnson. In the local area, the Volusia County Supervisor of Elections Office states 33,535 signed petition forms were submitted, while 26,782 were verified. However, only 18,962 were verified and submitted to the state. In Flagler, out of the 4,161 signatures submitted to the county, only 2,733 were submitted to Tallahassee, with 1,428 rejected signatures. The fight to legalize sports betting came after Governor Ron DeSantis and the Seminole Tribe struck a multibillion-dollar agreement in April 2021. to put the tribe at the helm of sports betting in Florida. The deal would later be authorized by the legislature by May. A similar gambling-initiative seeking limited authorization for casino gambling was also created parallel to the sports betting measure. That petition was supported by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation—a Nevada-based resort developer—and received 730,076 of the almost 900,000 signatures it needed to make it to November’s ballot.