City of Tallahassee Charter Initiatives

Any resident of Tallahassee can propose an amendment to the city charter. This process has several steps:

Create a political committee. The political committee is the official sponsor of the amendment.
Write the text of the proposed amendment. See below for details.
Create the petition form.
Circulate the petition for signature by Tallahassee voters.
Deliver signed petitions to the Elections Office and pay for signature verification.
We verify the information on the petition forms. If enough petitions are verified, we will notify you and the City Commission.
The City Commission passes an ordinance to place the proposed amendment on the General Election ballot.
The proposed amendment needs approval from a majority of voters voting on the amendment. If it passes, it becomes part of the city charter.

Create Political Committee

Visit our Political Groups page for information on how to create a political committee and file campaign finance reports.

File Reports

Political committees must file reports using the campaign finance reporting system.

Petiton Language and Format

You will need to write the full text of your proposed amendment. We cannot help you write it. You may want to work with an attorney to assist you.

Your petition form should contain the following information:

A ballot title of 15 words or less
A ballot summary of 75 words or less
The full text of the proposed amendment
Spaces for the following voter information:
- Name
- Address
- Date of Birth
- Signature and date signed by the voter
A political disclaimer reading: Pd. Pol. Adv. Paid for by [name and address of your committee]

We cannot design the form for you. However, we can review the form with you before you begin circulating it to collect signatures.

Sign Petition

Any voter residing in Tallahassee can sign your petition. Each voter can only sign once.

Gather Petitions

For the 2026 Election Cycle, you must have at least 12,194 valid petitions verified. This is 10% of the number of voters in Tallahassee in the last General Election.

Some petitions you gather may not be valid. We recommend that you gather at least 14,024 ‬to allow for rejected petitions.

Submit Petitions

You must submit your initial batch of petitions by noon, May 22, 2024.

If your initial batch of petitions does not contain sufficient valid petitions, you can submit additional petitions until noon, June 27, 2024.

Verification Costs

You can find the fee for each petition on the Citizen Initiatives page. We cannot start petition verification until the fee is paid.

If you are unable to pay the cost of verification, you can file an Affidavit of Undue Burden to waive the verification fees. However, if you file an undue burden you cannot pay people to circulate your petition. Also, at the end of the campaign before you dispose of any remaining campaign funds, you must reimburse us for the cost of petition verification if sufficient funds remain.

Petition Verification

We reject a petition as invalid if:

The person signing the petition is not registered to vote in Tallahassee.
The person has already signed the petition.
The petition form has errors.
The petition is incomplete or illegible.

Once enough valid signatures have been verified, we will pause any further verification and notify you and the City Commission.

Rather than have each petition verified, you can request to use the “random sampling” verification method. In random sampling, we do not verify each petition. Instead, we will verify a sample of 100 petitions. If there are issues with the first batch of 100 petitions, we will verify additional batches.

You must submit at least 14,802 petitions to use random sampling.

Random sampling may save you funds. You only need to pay the signature verification fee for the batches of ballots that we verify.