TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — From the moment Governor Ron DeSantis signed an exclusive gambling compact with the Seminole Tribe last spring, competitors have flooded Florida with cash to push initiatives that would help them split that lucrative pot.

8 On Your Side found in the last six months of 2021, at least $80 million has been spent by political committees representing gambling initiatives, and that doesn’t include dark money paid to non-profit political committees that aren’t disclosed under federal tax law.

Despite all the cash, at least two proposed constitutional amendments to expand gambling failed to make the ballot in 2022.

Republican consultant Anthony Pedicini says that’s not an accident.

“This legislature, or past legislatures, have made the petition gathering process extremely strenuous and arduous and more expensive,” Pedicini said. “So we’re preventing ballot initiatives before they start by doing that, and that happened here in both cases.

Several Republican legislators have introduced bills in recent years to make the amendment process more difficult.

“If we’re going to have this thing that kind of moves towards a direct democracy, are we going to become a direct democracy?” asked former state representative Jamie Grant rhetorically during a 2019 interview about his bill. “Is that just how we’re going to make all of our policy?”

When voters walk into the booth in November, they are likely to see only two proposed amendments on the ballot. That’s the fewest since 2000, when there was only one. According to the state website that tracks amendments, only one other time (1982) were there only two proposed amendments on the ballot.

One of the amendments voters will see this year is an initiative to abolish the Constitution Revision Commission, which would mean even fewer amendments.

The commission meets every 20 years. It last met in 2018, when it proposed eight ballot initiatives.

Fla. Rep. Mike Beltran (R-Lithia) sponsored that bill in the Florida House, and has introduced another bill in this legislative session that would limit citizen initiatives “to matters relating to procedural subjects or the structure of the government or of the State Constitution.”

HB 1127 passed both its committees in the House, and Beltran’s staff expects it to get a vote on the House floor. A similar measure in the Florida Senate, SJR 1412, is scheduled to be heard in the Ethics and Elections Committee on Tuesday afternoon.