A South Florida woman was arrested in Coral Springs last month after allegedly submitting nearly 100 fraudulent petitions in support of the marijuana constitutional amendment in 2023, state officials said.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement first began investigating Jessica Sonia Humphreys, 24, of Miami, in January 2023 after the Escambia County Supervisor of Elections Office reported to agents what it believed were multiple fraudulent petitions submitted by Humphreys in support of the amendment to legalize marijuana, FDLE said in a news release Tuesday night.
Humphreys had worked as a paid petition gatherer for Smart & Safe Florida at the time in several counties in North Florida, an organization advocating for legal personal marijuana use. FDLE agents then contacted the Santa Rosa County Supervisor of Elections about any petitions Humphreys submitted and found more with fake names, according to the news release.
In total, FDLE said Humphreys allegedly submitted 72 petitions with fake names. She is facing a total of 144 charges. Two arrest warrants were issued in November 2023 for the petitions in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties.
The Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office arrested Humphreys first in January 2024 on the FDLE warrant for 34 counts of petition fraud and 34 counts of perjury, and she did not appear at her next scheduled court hearing after posting bail, FDLE said.
She was arrested on Aug. 15 in Coral Springs after a traffic stop on the charges from the alleged fake petitions in Escambia County, according to FDLE. She has since been transferred to the Escambia County jail.
This January, the Office of Election Crimes and Security published a 942-page annual report, in part detailing “illegal compensation scheme” related to petitions and “petition circulator fraud,” allegedly in some instances committed through “bulk identity theft,” according to the report.
The OECS was created in 2022, and FDLE has since made at least 17 arrests of people in Florida who worked as paid petition circulators, the report said. Hundreds of criminal investigations were open at the time of the report. At least six paid petition gatherers for Smart & Safe Florida and another organization Sensible Florida were arrested by FDLE for marijuana petitions.
Humphreys’s case is cited in the report, having “explained that she allowed other people to use her circulator number and was paid for the petitions they completed.”
“That same defendant submitted a number of petitions that were completed in the names of individuals who were not registered Florida voters and appeared to be fictious,” the OECS report said.
Authorities believe Humphreys’ “actual number of fraud victims is much higher.” She submitted nearly 4,000 petitions total across Florida, and 2,064 of them were invalid for having non-voters or mismatched signatures, the report said.
“Humphreys said she could not explain how people and addresses that did not exist ended up on the petitions that she admitted to signing,” the FDLE warrant for her arrest said.
In May, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new bill, HB 1205, that voting rights advocates say makes it much more difficult for people to participate in the ballot initiative process. The new law cites “evidence of fraud.”
