In order to be adopted into the state constitution, Florida’s abortion amendment ballot initiative (Amendment 4) will have to get 60 percent or more of the votes this Election Day. That’s a pretty high threshold. Even given the fact that abortion rights have won in every state where they’ve been on the ballot, it’s not easy to be confident about reaching a threshold that high.
If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis were remotely confident that the initiative wouldn’t reach 60 percent, I think he’d be pretty happy about it being on the ballot, just so that he would be able to say “See! At least 41 percent of the state agrees with me on this!” and celebrate his victory over Floridians who favor bodily autonomy. Forced birth groups would be saying “bring it!”
But that is not what they are doing!
DeSantis has gone balls to the wall over the last few weeks trying to get the initiative off the ballot, deploying various state agencies to attack both the measure and the group that has been organizing in favor of it, Floridians Protecting Freedom. He had the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration set up a website in opposition to the measure. He had the Florida Department of Health send threatening letters to television stations demanding they stop running an ad supporting it, and threatening them with criminal penalties up to and including jail time if they refuse. Most recently, he deployed his “Election Police” to “investigate” the petition to get the measure on the ballot in the first place and to actually show up at people’s homes demanding to know whether they really signed it or not. Naturally, based on “the small sample” they reviewed, they determined that around 16.4 percent of the 900,000 signatures may be invalid.
The administration has since put out a 348-page preliminary report accusing Floridians Protecting Freedom of committing signature fraud.
Thousands of Florida voters have already voted on this issue, through mail-in-ballots. If the DeSantis administration had a legitimate challenge to the ballot measure, they should have raised it in January, or at least before those ballots went out. They don’t.
Yet, based on that “report,” a group of anti-abortion rights advocates has filed a lawsuit against Floridians Protecting Freedom to get the amendment off the ballot. Applying the 16.4 percent estimate, they claim that the petition only managed to get 833,521 valid signatures — less than the 891,523 signatures required by law.
They also contend that election supervisors “failed to conduct a sufficient review before verifying Amendment 4’s petition forms and signatures.”
But here’s the thing! If they really think that Floridians Protecting Freedom had to fake signatures in order to reach the threshold, they should not be worried about the ballot measure to begin with. If they are so sure that there are nowhere near enough people who support it to get that many signature, why are they worried that over 60 percent of the electorate will vote for it?
It’s almost as if they are all entirely full of shit. They know abortion is popular, and they know that if it goes to a vote they have a very strong chance of losing.
DeSantis, for his part, knows that if this ballot initiative does pass, that it will reflect badly on him and his ability to effectively run the state of Florida like a dictatorship — which will disappoint the loyalists who have enjoyed this Ron DeSantis dictatorship so far. It will also be evidence that Florida is not quite as rabidly red as he thinks it is.
This would probably make him real sad … perhaps even sad enough to make him start to question if people even like all of the terrible things he has been doing to their state over the last few years, and then where would he be?
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
That amendment on the ballot might, just might, help Dems win in Florida. That's another reason for the DeSantis and "friends" freak out.
I don't think he's worried about it getting 60%. I think he's worried that its presence on the ballot will draw enough Democrats to the voting booths to get to 51% for all the other things.