The Florida Department of State is investigating evidence of fraudulent abortion amendment petition gathering, a department spokesman told The Daily Wire Friday.
“The Department of State has uncovered evidence of illegal conduct with fraudulent petitions,” the spokesman said. “We have a duty to seek justice for Florida citizens who were victimized by fraud and safeguard the integrity of Florida’s elections.”
“Our office will continue this investigation and make referrals to FDLE [Florida Department of Law Enforcement] as appropriate,” he added.
The news comes after The Tampa Bay Times suggested that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was engaging in “political interference” when his deputy secretary of state asked supervisors to review around 36,000 signatures gathered in Hillsborough, Orange, Palm Beach, and Osceola counties.
Activists working with the pro-abortion group Floridians Protecting Freedom have collected almost 1 million signatures as part of an effort to get Amendment 4 on the ballot in November. The radical measure would supersede Florida’s law protecting unborn babies with a heartbeat, and would establish a “constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability,” that is, before the baby can survive outside the womb.
“This amendment is written maybe more liberal than New York and California, but you would basically have a cottage industry, where people would be coming into Florida for this purpose,” DeSantis said in late Juneduring a call with Florida faith leaders. “And look, we’re a tourism state, but we want to be family-friendly tourism, not abortion tourism.”
DeSantis and his team are actively fighting the amendment, arguing that its phrasing is purposefully crafted to confuse voters.
“The way they wrote the summary, there are people that are pro-life that poll in favor of this because they think it’s a pro-life amendment,” the governor added. “So, it needs to be very clear to every voter exactly what direction this amendment is going.”
Floridians Protecting Freedom did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Wire.
Left-wing activists have turned to abortion amendments to circumvent pro-life laws and lawmakers. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in May 2022, pro-abortion groups began ramping up efforts to craft ballot measures that enshrine a “right” to abortion into state constitutions — even in red states.
The efforts have been effective. In Michigan, voters legalized abortion up until birth through a November 2022 ballot initiative that prohibits any laws protecting the unborn if a “health care professional” deems the abortion “medically needed to protect a patient’s life or physical or mental health.”
Up to 10 states could have abortion measures on the ballot in 2024, according to a KFF ballot tracker. These pro-abortion amendments often receive monetary support from leftist activist groups like Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union, or from politicians and celebrities like former President Barack Obama and singer John Legend.
This is not the first time that concerns have been raised about the methods of signature gathering for abortion amendments.
When abortion activists successfully pushed Issue 1 in Ohio, pro-life activists accused the ACLU of paying out-of-state signature collectors to misrepresent the ballot amendment’s implications for parents.
Video taken by pro-life activists also showed a signature collector talking about collecting invalid signatures.
“The ACLU’s extreme anti-parent amendment is so unpopular that it couldn’t even rely on grassroots support to collect signatures,” Protect Women Ohio press secretary Amy Natoce said in a July 2023 statement.
“The ACLU paid out-of-state signature collectors to lie to Ohioans about its dangerous amendment that will strip parents of their rights, permit minors to undergo sex change operations without their parents’ knowledge or consent, and allow painful abortion on demand through all nine months. The ACLU’s attempts to hijack Ohio’s constitution to further its own radical agenda would be pathetic if they weren’t so dangerous.”
And in Arkansas, election officials fully rejected petitions gathered by Arkansans for Limited Government, the pro-abortion group pushing the state’s abortion petition, arguing that the group did not submit proper documentation about its paid signature gatherers, according to CBS News.
The state Supreme Court upheld this rejection, which stopped the proposal from being on the ballot this November.
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