Gov. Ron DeSantis opposes Amendment 4, which would enshrine abortion access in the state constitution if 60 percent of the state’s voters approve.
The Republican governor says some of the petitions submitted to get the measure on the ballot were fraudulent. But abortion access advocates say the governor’s moves are intended to intimidate and discourage supporters from voting.
An intensive search is on to discover whether fraudulent petitions were submitted on behalf of Amendment 4. The search includes investigators going door to door, questioning people who signed those petitions.
“… Having police knock on their doors, ask them if they legitimately signed a petition. This has left those voters impacted shaken and just scared of their engagement with things like signing petitions,” said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando.
Eskamani, who supports Amendment 4, says the consequences of DeSantis’ search for fraud are devastating to those targeted.
Eskamani also leads a third-party voter registration organization called People Power of Florida, which is contending with new laws passed by the GOP-led Legislature.
“So, I am concerned that law enforcement coming to people’s doors is creating an environment where people do not want to participate in elections,” she said, “and it creates this aura that you’ll be targeted if you sign on to an initiative that the governor doesn’t support.”
According to the Florida Department of State, 35 people are alleged to have committed fraud in getting Amendment 4 on the November ballot. Department spokesman Mark Ard says those 35 people submitted nearly 37,000 petitions statewide, and of those, the state found 14,000 to be invalid. They’re not included in the total that allowed the proposal to move forward, but Ard says more voters could have been victims of felony identity theft and forgery. The governor agrees.
“This group submitted dozens of petitions on behalf of dead people,” DeSantis said. “They saw those petitions being submitted. There are other petitions that have actually been validated where the signatures do not match the voter files. So, they were getting all of those complaints.”
DeSantis says the investigators are following the law, doing what they’re supposed to do to combat election fraud.
“We are not going to put up with it,” he said. “And so, if they identify – they HAVE identified examples that are going to be referred to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, those are going to be pursued. I mean, you know, if someone’s committing fraud, that undermines your rights.”
Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley says a high-stakes issue like Amendment 4 involves a lot of money. And as the threshold of getting amendments onto the ballots has been raised "you get some incentives here and there for people to go outside the boundaries of law,” he said.
“I think one of the unintended consequences of raising the threshold for getting things on the ballot is that there’s more incentive for fraud.”
But Keisha Mulfort of the ACLU of Florida points out the Department of State is offering already-discredited material.
“These letters are not new,” she said. “We already had these letters. These were petitions that the supervisor of elections did not verify. The supervisor of elections office reviews the petition signatures to verify that the person signing the petition is a registered voter in the county and that their signature matches their signature on file. The SOE will then pull the petition during that review so that they don’t count toward ballot placement.”
Advocates say they see the DeSantis administration’s actions as a distraction from what they believe the conversation should really be about: protecting the ability of Floridians to access abortion.
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