Ron DeSantis’ “Voting Police” Are Targeting Abortion Rights Petitioners

Abortion is on the ballot in 10 states this election. Direct democracy has provided an extraordinary avenue for protecting abortion in red states, but it’s also become the target of increasingly dangerous attacks on voting rights from anti-abortion groups, politicians, and state officials. On this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick was joined by Jessica Valenti?—feminist columnist and author of the forthcoming Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win—and Lauren Brenzel, campaign director for the Yes on 4 initiative seeking to put abortion protections to Florida voters in November. The discussion focused on the mounting campaign to prevent voters from actually voting on abortion—despite Justice Samuel Alito having promised to return the issue to the voters in Dobbs—and the reason Donald Trump said he supports returning abortion to the states at the presidential debate. The following transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: So Lauren, one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you as part of this conversation is this story from the Tampa Bay Times revealing that Florida’s Department of State is scrutinizing Amendment 4 signatures for vote fraud, and that Secretary of State Brad McVay is contacting supervisors to collect signatures for review. I think what is so crazy about this is how quickly we vaulted from We want to make sure people have the “right information” to Oh no, we’re knocking signatures off the freaking ballot. Tell us how we got here in Florida.

Lauren Brenzel: This is the playbook in Florida right now. It’s what our government does. There are a few people who are deeply in charge; who weaponize state systems against people. In 2022, we saw the arrest of numerous individuals who had felony convictions for registering to vote. Most of those cases were dismissed afterwards. We’ve had democratically elected officials removed from office for saying that they were going to protect abortion patients and abortion providers. This is the model and the playbook, and it’s really disheartening on our end because this coalition has worked incredibly hard to make this process as nonpolitical as possible.

We have really relied on the voters of Florida, on the coalition of organizations, on patient stories, and on activists in order to qualify this measure for the ballot. We have not been talking about any political party, we are not coordinated with the Florida Democratic Party. We are not speaking out against Republican actors because we know we have a 60 percent threshold to get Amendment 4 passed and we are aware that that means that people need to think of this issue as a health care issue, not a partisan issue. And so to have a year and a half of work entirely disrupted, and have this turn into a fight about Gov. Ron DeSantis, is very frustrating. We’re talking about our state constitution. This needs to last beyond any administration in Florida.

We’re facing a distraction and a misinformation campaign designed to cause fear and to weaponize all the systems. We’re having to fight on the legal front, we’re having to fight on the communications front, we’re having to fight on the reputational front. It’s the playbook of authoritarianism. People let a campaign like this happen against abortion rights because there are actors who are so radicalized on this issue that they believe that abortion advocates are actual murderers, so they’re willing to put aside any belief they have in democracy or democratic processes because they are such radicalized actors on this subject.

In Florida, we need 891,523 verified petitions to get on the ballot. That’s 8 percent of the electorate in our previous electoral cycle. We then also need to make sure that we reach 8 percent of the electorate in 14 congressional districts. Petitions also go through a financial estimating conference, and then you also have Florida state Supreme Court review. Petition collection ends in December, Supreme Court review doesn’t happen until April. We had to wait all the way until April 1 to get a ruling. We’re the only initiative I know of that was fined for having late petitions. Over half of those fines were later found to be not valid.

Now we’re seeing these investigations into the process of petition collecting, including having officers go to people’s doors. When that happens, there are some people who will say they didn’t sign the petition, whether they validly signed it or not, because it is intimidating to have an officer come to your door and ask you about the abortion petition.

I have 70-year-old white women telling me that they’re afraid to go vote this November. They think the election police are going to come after them to ask about whether they signed the abortion petition and what their vote is.

All of this is just creating this culture of fear and distraction and questioning legitimacy. And I also question whether or not it will be utilized to undermine future direct democracy. We had an initiative here that paid $100 million to collect petitions, because it was backed by the gaming industry. They will always be able to spend enough money to overcome hurdles and laws in the corporate sector. So these things become less about citizens referring things to the ballot, as the cost increases exponentially, because the weaponization of democracy against us increases exponentially. It removes the ballot initiative process from the people’s hands and places it only in entities that have the most money possible to overcome all of these legal hurdles that become more and more expensive and more and more challenging.

I’m reminded how so much of the language we heard from Trump at the debate was about how you can’t trust women with reproductive rights because they’re going to stagger in at the ninth month, or, in the EMTALA lawsuit, they’re going to lie, right, about mental health reasons to terminate. The presumption that women can’t be trusted with reproductive freedoms has been shot through since Roe.

But the layer you’ve just added, Lauren, is that also, women actually can’t be trusted with voting and democracy, either, because we lie and cheat there as well. And that’s how you vault yourself into alleging election fraud and false signatures.

Jessica, you warned us last February that people were being arrested for allegedly submitting fake signatures for Amendment 4. You said this was coming and you warned us about Florida’s Department of Election Crimes and Security that also is Orwellian and creepy in the extreme.

Jessica Valenti: As soon as I saw those couple of arrests and as soon as I saw that it was from the election security department that DeSantis had used previously to target Black voters, it was clear to me that this would be the perfect way for them to undermine and interrupt direct democracy for abortion rights, because it gives them the ability to pretend that the overwhelming support for abortion rights isn’t real. They can say, “Actually those are fake voters, or fake votes. People do want the abortion ban. This is the will of the people.” They know that voters overwhelmingly support abortion rights because they know that Americans overwhelmingly don’t want the government involved at all in pregnancy decisions. They know they’re losing so badly on that front, but they need to pretend otherwise. That’s why they’re using language like “will of the people,” and using language like “consensus.” Anything that gives them the ability to say that support for abortion rights isn’t real was going to appeal to them. That’s what we’re seeing. It’s so upsetting on so many different levels, but it’s also the gaslighting that really pisses me off. Just this absolute gaslighting, claiming this support for reproductive freedom isn’t real—claiming it’s invented, made-up, paid support.

The chilling effect, the intimidation, is just par for the course with everything that they’re doing around abortion. There is so much fear and they are taking advantage of that, and we’ve seen the same playbook in so many different states.

I wrote about how, in South Dakota, folks who signed a pro-choice petition there got calls from folks who said they were from the Secretary of State’s office, pressuring them to take their names off the petition. In fact, they were not from the Secretary of State’s office. They were from an anti-abortion group.

And in addition to that chilling effect, all these efforts are not just being led on a state level. They’re all very similar for a reason. They’re all very similar because big national anti-abortion groups and conservative legal organizations are dictating exactly how to do this.

In Florida and Missouri, opponents of abortion rights tried to jam up the ballot initiative in the financial assessment stage. In Missouri, the Republican state auditor said that restoring abortion rights would cost about $51,000, and then the Missouri attorney general said, I’m not signing off on that because you need to write that it would cost $51 billion, and so that held up the signature-gathering process for months.

All of which is to say they are all using the same playbook. This is not just happening on the state level. This is a national scheme to disenfranchise voters in general, but really when it comes to abortion rights in particular, using dirty trick after dirty trick.