Abortion officially became part of the Florida ballot ahead of November earlier this year. But the initiative may come into some troubles before people can actually vote for it, with the DeSantis administration announcing it is examining thousands of petition signatures and looking for fraud.
Concretely, Gov. Ron DeSantis' deputy secretary of state has asked supervisors in Hillsborough, Orange, Palm Beach and Osceola counties to gather roughly 36,000 signatures for the state to review.
It remains unclear if the request could be used to challenge Amendment 4— which seeks to protect abortion rights in the Sunshine State— or remove it from the ballot altogether. A state law deadline to challenge the validity of the signatures has long passed.
If passed, Amendment 4 will enshrine abortion into the state constitution, protecting reproductive rights access and undo the state's six-week abortion ban that DeSantis has been a vocal supporter of.
The thousands of signatures that have been asked to be verified are part of the nearly 1 million collected and previously verified by local supervisors as belonging to real Floridians.
The new request by the DeSantis administration is only asking for signatures that were already deemed valid, a move that struck some supervisors as odd, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
"I have never in my tenure had a request like this one," said Osceola County Supervisor of Elections Mary Jane Arrington, a Democrat who has been in the job for 16 years.
When asked why the state was focusing on verified signatures, Department of State spokesperson Ryan Ash did not say.
"By statute, the Department of State has an obligation to investigate credible allegations of fraudulent petitions," Ash said in a statement.
To get an amendment on the ballot in Florida, petition collectors must get nearly 900,000 verified signatures. They must also get a required number of valid petitions in at least half of Florida's 28 congressional districts.
Floridians Protecting Freedom, the organizer of the ballot initiative, surpassed that requirement and got the proper amount of signatures in 17 districts. It collected about 100,000 more valid petitions that were necessary for ballot placement, according to the Division of Election's database.
The state has seen in recent years a surge in ballot petition fraud, in which somebody working on behalf of a campaign submits fraudulent signatures. The secretary of state's voter fraud unit, which was created in 2022, has aided in investigations that led to the arrest of two people this year on charges of forging signatures in support of Amendment 4.
Past petition fraud cases have been built around signatures that supervisors deemed invalid or obviously fraudulent. In the 2022 effort to expand casino gaming, for instance, someone fraudulently submitted the signatures of Marion County's elections supervisor and his wife.
The initiative's organizers have shown their disappointment at the new request. Lauren Brenzel, campaign director for Floridians Protecting Freedom said the state already confirmed the amendment petitions early this year. She said any attempt to question the verified petitions' validity and undermine the vote "is an attack on Floridians' rights, their future, and democracy at-large."
"This is nothing more than trickery by extreme politicians who fear the will of the people," Brenzel said in a statement.
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