Vote no on unneeded Amendment No. 1

Measured by word count, the campaign for Amendment No. 1 on this fall’s ballot might be the most expensive change ever proposed to the Florida Constitution.

The latest campaign finance report shows Florida Citizen Voters had raised $8.3 million to get two words added to the constitution.

The constitution currently says that “every citizen” who is 18 and a resident of Florida can vote. The proposal would change that to say “only a citizen” who is 18 and a resident of Florida can vote.

Backers of the measure say the constitution’s current wording opens the door to non-citizens voting in elections, and cite examples elsewhere. The best known might be San Francisco, which allows non-citizens with children to vote for school board members. Several towns in

Maryland have started allowing non-citizens to vote.

Naturally, then, a multimillion-dollar campaign to change Florida’s constitution is needed. Except, it’s not.

Florida law states that a person can register to vote only if they are a citizen of the United States. Problem solved, you would think. And there’s zero chance the law is going to change, considering this is the state that just outlawed so-called “sanctuary cities.”

And yet, here we are, deciding whether to alter the constitution to stop something that not only isn’t happening here but already is prohibited by state law.

This measure seems innocuous enough except that Amendment No. 1 owes its life to dark money.

The $8.3 million that Florida Citizen

Voters has raised to collect the signatures it needed to get on the ballot has come almost exclusively from a nonprofit called Citizen Voters Inc., which hasn’t reported where it got its money.

As with Amendment No. 4, the proposal to hold two separate votes on constitutional amendments, we don’t know who’s bankrolling this measure, which could tell us a thing or two about the motives.

That’s what dark money does. It allows the money to hide, which is why Floridians should be suspicious of any initiative that’s getting the bulk of its money from dark sources.

A Tampa Bay Times article suggested the ballot initiative might have been an attempt to thwart a separate initiative to do away with utility monopolies by clogging up supervisors office election offices with hundreds of thousands of citizen petitions that needed to be verified.

We don’t know if that’s the case. But we do know this amendment is unneeded, it’s redundant, it’s junking up an already crowded ballot and it’s bankrolled by contributors who want to keep their identities secret.

Those are plenty of reasons for voters to say no to Amendment No. 1.

Election endorsements are the opinion of the Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board, which consists of Opinion Editor Mike Lafferty, Jennifer A. Marcial Ocasio, Jay Reddick, David Whitley and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Sentinel Columnist Scott Maxwell participates in interviews and deliberations. Send emails to insight@orlandosentinel.com.