TALLAHASSEE, Florida (LifeSiteNews) — The Florida Department of State (DOS) Office of Election Crimes & Security (OECS) has released a 348-page interim report on its findings so far about substantial petition fraud allegedly used to get a radical pro-abortion amendment on the November ballot.
Amendment 4, the so-called “Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion,” states that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” If enacted, it would require abortion to be allowed for any reason before fetal “viability” and render post-“viability” bans effectively meaningless by exempting any abortion that an abortionist claims is for “health” reasons, though abortion – the killing of an innocent unborn child in the womb – is never necessary nor justifiable. If successful, the amendment would overturn Florida’s six-week abortion ban.
The amendment ostensibly says that it “does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.” But many, such as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, have warned that “there’s a difference between consent,” which is what current law requires, “and notification. Notification is after the fact. The consent is obviously a condition precedent. They did that because they know going after parents’ rights is a vulnerability.”
Last month, the DeSantis administration announced it would be looking into signatures from “nearly 37,000 submitted petitions” gathered by 35 individuals, following examples of the signatures of dead people and non-matching signatures, as well as reports from people who did “not sign the petition forms submitted in their names” and even forged signatures.
On October 11, Florida Deputy Secretary of State for Legal Affairs & Election Integrity Brad McVay signed a letter detailing OECS’s investigation so far into allegations of petition fraud against “Floridians Protecting Freedom” (FPF), the pro-abortion group behind the amendment.
“Beginning in late 2023 and continuing into early 2024,” the letter says, the state was “inundated with complaints” against FPF “and its agents. The allegations included reports of paid FPF petition circulators signing petitions on behalf of deceased individuals, forging or misrepresenting elector signatures of petitions, using electors’ personal identifying information without consent, and perjury/false swearing.”
The letter reveals that OECS has initiated “well more than 100 preliminary criminal investigations” into potential fraud, including “thousands” of petitions that were validated despite failing to match the signatures on file and/or having been gathered by “known fraudsters,” as well as “credible allegations” that petition circulators were paid for their work, which is a third-degree felony in Florida. “Several entities linked to FPF were so brazen as to advertise this illegal arrangement on social media websites,” it adds.
The investigation could potentially lead to a legal challenge to Amendment 4’s placement on the ballot, which, if successful, could void the amendment from taking effect even if 60 percent of the electorate votes to pass it.
The stakes of Amendment 4 are high not only for the fate of Florida’s current pro-life laws, but for the broader national trend of state abortion battles in an America without Roe v. Wade. The abortion lobby has had great success using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public, most visibly in the area of state constitutional amendments proclaiming “rights” to abortion immune from future legislation.
Pro-lifers have either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box, as well as a debate among Republicans over the political ramifications of continuing to take a clear pro-life position.
Constitutional amendments require 60 percent of the vote in Florida (as opposed to the simple-majority threshold in states such as Michigan and Ohio), and polls have disagreed as to whether the amendment can reach it.
The outcome may come down to how well pro-lifers can disseminate the actual facts of what Amendment 4 does. Polling by public opinion firm NextGen Polling found that while 57 percent supported the amendment overall, 64 percent of Republican respondents, 34 percent of Democrats, and 43 percent of Independents were less likely to support it when informed it could relax standards of who actually commits abortions to non-physicians.
DeSantis has taken multiple steps to work against the amendment, including the aforementioned investigation, the launch of a political committee dedicated to defeating it, lobbying other Florida Republicans to speak up, work by the state health department to disseminate the real facts about both current law and the amendment, and a recent statewide day of prayer for Florida’s pro-life protections.
Between that and the GOP’s unprecedented million-count voter registration advantage in the Sunshine State, both sides are deeply invested in the outcome of Florida’s abortion battle this fall, which will either continue or break that trend.