Florida governor Ron DeSantis—hot off his failed primary challenge to former President Donald Trump—is now mobilizing his government against a measure that would restore abortion rights in Florida.
One state agency launched a new website attacking the ballot measure. Another threatened TV stations that ran an ad supporting it. And last Friday, Florida’s Secretary of State released a report attacking the petition that got abortion on the November ballot—one month after a new police unit created by DeSantis began knocking on the doors of Florida voters who signed that petition.
The moves have earned DeSantis sharp rebukes from Florida Democrats and the Federal Communications Commission, as well as from civil liberties and women’s health advocates across the state.
“This authoritarian overreach is deeply dangerous and has real, life-threatening consequences for women across Florida,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.
DeSantis’s crusade has been inventive and widespread, even for Florida. In early September, reports surfaced that the state’s newly created election police unit was knocking on the doors of voters who signed a petition to get the abortion measure, dubbed Amendment 4, on the ballot in November. Officially, police have said, the interviews are part of a larger investigation into the signature-gathering process. (State officials confirmed months ago that Amendment 4’s backers had obtained the 100,000 valid signatures required to get it on the ballot.)
At roughly the same time, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration—the department typically tasked with licensing hospitals and nursing homes—launched a new web page claiming to fact-check components of Amendment 4. Titled “Florida is Protecting Life,” the page slams “fearmongers” and suggests Florida could become “an abortion tourism destination state” if the measure passes. The Florida Health Department has since followed that up with a series of cease-and-desist letters to television stations, ordering them to stop airing an ad from Amendment 4 advocates.
As if all that weren’t dubious enough, Florida’s Secretary of State took the issue further last Friday, by issuing a 348-page report that accused backers of submitting hundreds of forged and fraudulent signatures. The ACLU of Florida says those accusations only apply to a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of signatures that advocates collected—and has no legal bearing on whether the measure should appear on next month’s ballot. That did not, of course, prevent anti-abortion activists from filing a Wednesday lawsuit to void the abortion measure, citing claims in the secretary of state’s investigation.
If passed, Amendment 4 would effectively reverse Florida’s six-week abortion ban and bar future restrictions on the procedure before 24 weeks or so. Similar ballot measures have passed in conservative states including Kansas and Ohio.
But even before DeSantis’s machinations, Amendment 4 seemed unlikely to fly in Florida; state law sets a 60% threshold to pass amendments to the state constitution, and recent polling has found that less than half of likely voters support the new protections for abortion.
