Inside Ron DeSantis’s Quest to Trample the Will of Florida Voters on Abortion

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has spent the last year throwing the full weight of his administration behind killing Amendment 4, a citizen-led ballot initiative to enshrine the right to an abortion “before viability” in the state constitution.

DeSantis’s opposition to the amendment is not altogether surprising — if approved by voters in the November election, it would effectively invalidate a six-week abortion ban that he signed into law, which went into effect in May. But his tactics have been raising alarm bells, even from within his administration. Earlier this month, the general counsel for the Florida Department of Health resigned in protest over cease-and-desist letters he claimed DeSantis’s office ordered him to send to television stations that aired an ad in support of the proposed amendment.

The letters were just the latest in a series of drastic steps the governor has taken to interfere with direct democracy this election cycle. DeSantis’s administration has taken to the courts to block the abortion amendment, which made it onto the ballot with the support of 1 million Floridians, as well as another citizen-led effort to legalize marijuana. The governor has deployed the state’s election police to intimidate petition signers, and used state agencies and systems to spread misinformation about what both amendments would do. And according to estimates, he’s spent more than $19 million of public money along the way.

Democracy and voting rights experts say that these efforts are all a part of DeSantis’s well-worn anti-democratic playbook, pointing to the series of voter restrictions pushed through by DeSantis and his allies, including a law that created an office focused on investigating alleged election crimes. And if he succeeds in quashing the amendments, critics argue, there will be no reining him in. DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

“There’s been an intentional weaponization of every state agency to pursue his political agenda,” said Florida state Rep. Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando. “And, of course, that’s been centered on Amendment 4, but it’s been a pattern of behavior on several fronts.”

Legal Challenges

The DeSantis administration and allied state officials have relied heavily on the legal system and courts to stifle both the abortion ballot measure and the separate effort to legalize marijuana, Amendment 3.

State law requires the attorney general to ask the Florida Supreme Court if proposed constitutional amendments meet certain legal requirements. In doing so, the attorney general can also make an argument for or against it. Attorney General Ashley Moody argued that both amendments did not pass legal muster and tried to block them from appearing on the ballot. The court was unimpressed with her arguments. In April, the court rejected Moody’s claim that Amendment 3 was unclear and improperly drafted to cover multiple subjects, since it would both decriminalize and commercialize recreational marijuana.

In a separate opinion that same month, the court rejected Moody’s argument that voters might be confused at the scope of Amendment 4. “[T]he broad sweep of this proposed amendment is obvious in the language of the summary,” the court ruled in a particularly biting decision. “Denying this requires a flight from reality.” 

State law also requires that a financial impact statement appear beside citizen-led initiatives on the ballot. Last year, a four-person panel stacked with DeSantis loyalists drafted a financial impact statement for Amendment 4. According to Keisha Mulfort, senior communications adviser for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, “typically” these statements will simply say that the financial impact is “indeterminate.”

And that’s what the panel said about Amendment 4 at first. At the time, Florida’s six-week abortion ban was tied up in litigation, and the panelists wrote that the uncertainty of the outcome made it such that “the impact of the proposed amendment on state and local government revenues and costs, if any, cannot be determined.”

After the Florida Supreme Court allowed the ban to go into effect, a judge ordered the panel to revise the financial impact statement, arguing that it was “unclear and confusing.”

The panel’s members are two representatives selected by DeSantis; one person appointed by Republican House Speaker Paul Renner, an outspoken opponent of Amendment 4; and conference chair and coordinator of Florida Economic and Demographic Research, Amy Baker. After meeting again in July, the panel released a revised statement.

“The financial impact statement was written by the same politicians who want to keep this extreme abortion ban in place.”

“The proposed amendment would result in significantly more abortions and fewer live births per year in Florida,” the new statement reads. “The increase in abortions could be even greater if the amendment invalidates laws requiring parental consent before minors undergo abortions and those ensuring only licensed physicians perform abortions. There is also uncertainty about whether the amendment will require the state to subsidize abortions with public funds. Litigation to resolve those and other uncertainties will result in additional costs to the state government and state courts that will negatively impact the state budget.”

Baker was the only dissenter.

Advocates for Amendment 4 were swift to call out the misleading language in the statement, which they unsuccessfully challenged in court. In a statement, the ACLU of Florida took particular issue with the speculation about future litigation, arguing that the statement should have been a “neutral explanation” of the amendment’s likely impact to the budget, and contending that DeSantis and his loyalists hijacked the process for political gain.

“The intention of the government was to mislead people,” said Mulfort. “The financial impact statement was written by the same politicians who want to keep this extreme abortion ban in place. They know that their position is deeply unpopular and they have resorted to unfair and deceptive tactics to trick voters.”

The Election Police

In September, a police detective showed up at Isaac Menasche’s home. The officer questioned Menasche about whether he signed the petition to get Amendment 4 on the ballot, according to an account Menasche later posted to Facebook. “The experience has left me shaken,” wrote Menasche, who said police arrived with a 10-page dossier on him, which included a copy of his driver’s license and a copy of the petition he signed.

Although the full scope of the investigation is unclear, additional petition signers have come forward saying they were questioned by law enforcement about the initiative. And the state’s Office of Election Crimes and Security reportedly opened over 40 separate investigations into petition gatherers on the campaign.

Natasha Sutherland, senior adviser to the Yes on 4 campaign, said it’s hard to read what happened to voters like Menasche as anything other than an intimidation tactic. “Knocking on folks’ doors, scaring them from engaging in the democratic process, the citizens initiative process, it’s really unfortunate and harmful to the democratic process,” she said.

Sutherland said that the concern isn’t just about one petition; it’s about a culture of fear around civic engagement. “If they got a few press hits out of it, scared a few voters that read [about] it, that would mean they won’t sign a petition in the future for an amendment,” she argued. That would be a win for DeSantis.

A few weeks after voters were visited by police, the election crimes unit released a report accusing Floridians Protecting Freedom, a coalition working to pass Amendment 4, of “widespread” fraud and hit the organization with a fine of $328,000, which FPF has said it will contest.

The Office of Election Crimes and Security’s late-stage report about the measure’s signature drive launched more than a dozen lawsuits in courts around Florida, all of them shepherded by the same retired state Supreme Court justice, Alan Lawson. The effort is being underwritten by an unnamed “angel financier,” Lawson told the Miami Herald, and it asks judges to remove Amendment 4 from the ballot or invalidate it if it passes.

“There’s no possible world where a judge somehow tries to keep it off the ballot at this stage,” said law professor Michael Morley, director of Florida State University’s Election Law Center, given that many people have already voted on Amendment 4. And while there’s some precedent for courts invalidating a ballot measure after it passes, it’s a high bar.

“It’s not enough just to show there were mistakes,” Morley said. “For an after-the-fact challenge, it has to be systemic fraud.”

Unprecedented Ad Blitz

In addition to the legal challenges, the DeSantis administration has funneled millions of dollars from at least six state agencies’ budgets against the abortion and marijuana amendments. The state has racked up an estimated $19.3 million in bills, as documented in detail by Orlando-based investigative reporter Jason Garcia, based on recent contracts and purchase orders.

“We have never seen a governor direct state agencies to aggressively oppose a ballot measure that has qualified for the ballot,” said Daniel Smith, a University of Florida political scientist who studies ballot initiatives.

The administration has spent much of this money on advertisements — and in doing so, is benefiting from an ambiguity in Florida law, according to Morley. There is a clear prohibition on local and county officials spending public funds on ads about ballot measures, and another law against state officers and employees using their titles and authority to weigh in on candidate elections.

“But for political appointees at the state level on ballot initiatives? That’s a gray area,” Morley said.

The governor is taking full advantage of that grayness to pump out advertisements and other materials opposing Amendment 4, both explicitly and in ads that defend the current ban without mentioning the ballot initiative. In one recent ad, which was sponsored by four state agencies, an anti-abortion doctor who was appointed by DeSantis to Florida’s medical board tries to soften the state’s ban, which is one of the strictest in the country.

The ad is part of a “Florida Cares” campaign spearheaded by the Agency for Health Care Administration, which set up a website that explicitly opposes Amendment 4 and decries its supporters as deceptive “fearmongers.” In September, AHCA took out TV and radio ads defending the current ban, then launched paid ads on Facebook and Instagram in early October. AHCA’s social media ads on those platforms have been co-sponsored by the state departments of Children and Families, or DCF; Education; and Health.

In September, Floridians Protecting Freedom and the ACLU of Florida tried to challenge the legality of AHCA’s media campaign, but a judge quickly tossed the lawsuit. In October, the Florida Supreme Court rejected a similar challenge.

Other departments are running anti-marijuana ads, which are styled as public service announcements and were rolled out as early voting started on Amendment 3. On Monday, DCF posted one such ad to X, which was co-sponsored by the Department of Health. On October 23, DCF, with the backing of the Health and Education departments, started running one such ad on Facebook and Instagram. The three departments co-sponsored another ad that was posted online on October 20, and the state Department of Transportation put out its own in mid-October.

Like AHCA, DCF has used its website and official social media presence to amplify DeSantis’s campaign against the two ballot measures, including by sharing videos of the governor railing against the proposed amendments at press conferences.

“We could sit here and have an entire article on all of the things that the government could be spending that money on that we actually need in the third most populous state in the country.”

The administration’s ad blitz has laid bare the state’s spending priorities. As Garcia reported, almost $3.9 million for recent DCF ads apparently came from the state’s opioid settlement fund, which by law is meant for programs that curb the opioid epidemic. (DCF did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about the ads or their funding source.)

“Honestly, we could sit here,” Sutherland said, “and have an entire article on all of the things that the government could be spending that money on that we actually need in the third most populous state in the country, and fighting to keep an abortion ban isn’t one of them.”

In addition to funding its own ad campaign, the DeSantis administration has also gone on the offensive against pro-Amendment 4 advertisements. In early October, the state Department of Health sent threatening letters to dozens of TV stations that carried a pro-Amendment 4 ad. The letter alleged that Floridians Protecting Freedom’s advertisement posed a “sanitary nuisance” because it supposedly misrepresented the state’s abortion ban. The Department of Health threatened the stations with criminal proceedings over the ad.

The amendment campaign sued to stop the DeSantis administration from blocking political speech through threats and the thin pretense of public health. It was in that litigation that the Department of Health’s former top lawyer filed an affidavit revealing that DeSantis’s closest legal advisers had drafted the letters without his input.

The Federal Communications Commission condemned the letters, and a federal judge quickly ordered the DeSantis administration to stop using the state’s legal apparatus to chill political speech. But Moody continued to defend the state’s authority to send similar threats, and the health department signed contracts worth up to $1.4 million with two law firms to represent the state regarding “false political advertisements.” On Tuesday, the judge extended the temporary order until after Election Day.

Suppressing the Vote

Ashley “AG” Green, an organizer with Dream Defenders, a grassroots abolitionist organization in Florida, said DeSantis’s anti-democratic tendencies have been apparent since he ran for governor six years ago. “He’s truly rigged the game at every level,” Green said.

Back in 2018, Green was working on the campaign to pass a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to the roughly 1.4 million Floridians with previous felony convictions.

Then gubernatorial candidate DeSantis raged against the proposed amendment while campaigning against Democrat Andrew Gillum, making explicit his intentions to fight against its implementation. On election night, Green recalled a “crushing sense” that even though they’d won the fight to pass the amendment, DeSantis’s victory would somehow taint it.

And they were right. In 2019, the Republican-controlled state legislature began passing a series of laws dulling the effects of the constitutional amendment. On the regulatory side, DeSantis ignored calls from advocates to create a central database where “returning citizens” could easily check to make sure they’d paid off their fines and court fees, a prerequisite to voting, leaving them to navigate a labyrinth of different state and local court systems.

Then came the election police. In 2022, DeSantis signed into existence the Office of Election Crimes and Security, a law enforcement body tasked with investigating election fraud and related crimes. Critics immediately sounded the alarm that the unit would be used to intimidate voters and create a culture of fear, particularly for the millions of newly enfranchised voters in the state who had no easy way to check their voting eligibility. 

Early one morning in August 2022, Florida police raided the homes of 20 returning citizens for alleged voter fraud. Body camera footage would later reveal that many of the people arrested were shocked and confused, some having even received official documentation from the county about their eligibility. “Voter fraud?” exclaimed one of the women arrested, 55-year-old Romona Oliver. “I voted, but I ain’t commit no fraud.”

The targeted voters were “people who maybe hadn’t voted in 20 or 30 years and are finally getting their rights restored, so excited to be able to vote again, only for the police to knock on their door,” said Andrea Mercado, executive director of Florida Rising, a civic engagement organization in Florida. “It seems very spiteful, but also focused on trying to create a climate of fear that if, you know, some fee somewhere hasn’t been paid, that by voting they will risk being incarcerated.” 

The law creating the elections police is just one of several new statutes impacting the voting process. “It is particularly egregious that many of these new laws disproportionately affect the voting rights of people of color,” said Jonathan Webber, Florida policy director with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Webber pointed to Senate Bill 7050, a 2023 law that imposed new “bureaucratic” regulations and financial penalties for community-based voter registration groups. “Black and Hispanic voters are more dependent on these organizations than their white counterparts, making voter registration drives essential for their full participation in our democracy. Without these efforts, it is unclear how many eligible citizens will participate this year,” he said. “This situation is disheartening, anti-democratic, and completely unnecessary.”

The threat to voter mobilization groups isn’t hyperbole. In 2022, Green said her organization had to stop doing voter registration work after threats of legal action from DeSantis’s election police. Despite attempts to restart their efforts in 2024, capacity issues and the legal risks “felt pretty insurmountable,” she said.

“All of the possible penalties that third-party voter registration organizations could potentially face for doing work they’ve done for decades, that’s adding up to a really bad environment,” concurred Leah Wong, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “These are just some of the things he’s done to create an environment where people feel less empowered to vote.”

Eskamani, who is up for reelection this year, said that despite the mountain of obstacles DeSantis has erected, it’s imperative that people show up to vote anyway.

“If we don’t win, and they’re successful, it gives permission for so many other extremists, for so many other governors to do the same thing,” she said. “To use public money to campaign, to weaponize every state agency to pursue a political agenda.”

Update: October 29, 2024, 12:00 p.m. ET
This article was updated to mention a new court order extending a temporary restraining order against the DeSantis administration until after Election Day.

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