“They know we’re winning ... and yet they’re pulling every trick in their playbook,” an attorney with the ACLU of Florida said of Republicans attempting to undermine a pro-choice amendment on the state's ballot.
When Donald Trump attempts to defend his unpopular but ever-changing stance on abortion, he never fails to come back to his safest talking point: He allowed the states to decide how to regulate abortion.
He presents it as a shining example of simply letting democracy flourish. “It’s the vote of the people now,” he said during the presidential debate on Tuesday. “It’s not tied up in the federal government. I did a great service in doing it.”
But in three states with critical abortion rights measures on the ballot in November, Republicans are engaged in a dedicated campaign to strip voters of that choice. Conservatives are making last-ditch court efforts in Florida, Missouri and Nebraska to remove abortion rights questions from the ballot, using either government intimidation or far-fetched legal theories.
Desperate attempts to keep abortion off the ballot signal just how popular pro-choice policies are. Recent polling in all three states shows that a majority of voters would support their state’s abortion rights amendment.
In Florida, for example, anti-abortion Republicans have weaponized a supposed nonpartisan government agency to spread misinformation and have launched an unprecedented investigation into thousands of already-verified petition signatures under the guise of voter fraud. And this is all happening less than two months before Election Day.
“I could have just said, ‘You know what, it’s on the ballot, people can decide, let the chips fall where they may.’ But that’s not the right thing to do,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said this week at a Tallahassee megachurch where he rallied conservative Christian groups to vote against the state’s pro-choice amendment. The amendment would restore abortion access until fetal viability (about 22-24 weeks into a pregnancy), loosening Florida’s current six-week abortion ban.
Abortion rights amendments, the majority of which enshrine access to the procedure until fetal viability into the state constitution, have been extremely successful in both red and blue states since the fall of Roe. When Americans get to vote directly on abortion, they overwhelmingly vote pro-choice. Republicans now know this and are doing everything in their power to keep abortion bans in place.
“The only way conservatives know how to win right now is to change the rules rather than allow the people to decide on the merits of an issue,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, who has worked with citizen-led campaigns in all 10 states where an abortion rights amendment is in play.
Pro-choice amendments in Missouri and Nebraska were challenged by a conservative Christian law firm that argued that both measures violated state law requiring amendments to only address a single subject. Republicans in both states claimed that “reproductive freedom” encompasses more than one issue (conservatives in Florida also used this argument).
This came after years of abortion rights advocates working tirelessly in each state to get enough voter signatures for the question to appear on the ballot, get those signatures verified by the state and get the measure certified, among other steps.
A conservative judge in Missouri ruled in favor of the complaint against that state’s abortion rights amendment, filed by the Christian law firm on behalf of two Republican state lawmakers. The issue was taken to the state Supreme Court mere hours before the deadline to remove a question from the ballot.
The night before the state Supreme Court arguments, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, an anti-abortion Republican, decertified the ballot measure in a largely symbolic but unprecedented attempt to block it from appearing in front of voters. An amendment has not been ordered off the Missouri ballot in several decades, and yet GOP lawmakers were working overtime to suppress the vote in the eleventh hour.
“The fact that [abortion] is controversial does not mean that the courts and state officials should cast aside the fundamental right to have that vote,” said Chuck Hatfield, a lawyer for Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the group behind the pro-choice amendment.
Less than three hours before the deadline, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that Ashcroft had missed his window to decertify the measure and that the question to enshrine abortion access in the state constitution could appear on the ballot.
Ultimately, the fight for reproductive freedom is also the fight for our democracy. Chris Melody Fields Figueredo
Nebraska’s Supreme Court heard similar oral arguments this week to block the state’s abortion rights amendment, which would restore access to the procedure until fetal viability and loosen the state’s 12-week abortion ban. In addition, Nebraska may include a competing anti-abortion measure, which would enshrine the 12-week abortion ban into the state constitution.
The state Supreme Court is expected to hand down a ruling any day now. Friday is the deadline for Nebraska’s ballot certification.
The strategy used in Nebraska and Missouri isn’t new, and it’s already been successful in other states. Last month, Arkansas’ conservative Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state’s attorney general, who used a paperwork technicality to argue that a pro-choice measure should be kept from going before voters in November. The amendment would have loosened the state’s near-total abortion ban.
Two of Arkansas’ state Supreme Court justices accused Republicans of changing the rules during the ballot process to intentionally disqualify the pro-choice measure. “This requirement was made up out of whole cloth,” the justices wrote in their dissent. “Regnat Populus – The People Rule – is the motto of Arkansas. Today’s decision strips every Arkansan of this power.”
The abortion rights amendment in Florida was already certified by the state’s Supreme Court, one of the most conservative in the nation, in April. But that doesn’t mean the GOP attacks have stopped; it simply means they’ve moved on to the next strategy in their anti-abortion campaign: misinformation.
Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration, a publicly funded nonpartisan government group, launched a targeted campaign against the state’s pro-choice amendment that included TV ads and a “ transparency page ” on the state website that demands voters “keep Florida from becoming an abortion tourism destination state.” The campaign is full of false claims about the amendment, as well as misleading statements that downplay the dangers of the state’s current six-week abortion ban.
Months before Florida’s AHCA launched its ad campaign against the amendment, Florida Republicans funneled $1 million in taxpayer money to the state agency for “marketing.” The ACLU of Florida plans to file a lawsuit against AHCA on behalf of Floridians Protecting Freedom, the collective that created the abortion rights amendment, arguing that it’s illegal for state agencies to take part in political campaigns.
“They know we’re winning, they know Floridians are against Florida’s cruel and extreme abortion ban, and yet they’re pulling every trick in their playbook,” Keisha Mulfort, an attorney with the ACLU of Florida, said in a press call this week.
“It is deeply troubling to see Florida politicians wield the full power of state government to intimidate and mislead Floridians on Amendment 4 while also suppressing their voices,” Mulfort continued. “They claim to defend freedom, yet they’re using state resources to pressure certain communities into silence.”
Florida already has some of the highest thresholds for getting a ballot measure approved: Floridians Protecting Freedom had to get nearly 1 million validated signatures and meet thresholds in half of the state’s 28 congressional districts in less than a year. In order to pass, the measure must get at least 60% of the vote, rather than a simple majority.
The pro-choice measure cleared nearly all of these hurdles, and yet DeSantis and his GOP supermajority continue to change the goalposts at every step. Over the summer, DeSantis replaced a state economist on an administrative committee with a Heritage Foundation pundit to create a deceptive financial statement that will appear alongside the pro-choice amendment. Most recently, DeSantis directed the Florida Department of State to investigate 36,000 already-verified signatures for fraud, even though Floridians Protecting Freedom paid election supervisors over $1 million to count and verify each signature. The nearly 1 million signatures needed to get the abortion measure on the ballot were verified by the state over seven months ago, in February.
Republicans have used these anti-abortion tactics in states across the country, including in Arizona and South Dakota, where abortion will be on the ballot in November despite GOP attacks. Even after Ohioans voted to codify abortion rights into the state constitution last year, the Republican-controlled government is still fighting the legitimacy of that decision. Republicans may be scrambling to find a popular post-Roe policy stance on abortion, but it doesn’t mean they won’t do everything in their power to keep abortion bans in place.
“Certain politicians, who tend to be from the GOP, are in real time undermining what our democracy means and moving us more towards authoritarianism and minority rule,” said Fields Figueredo, from the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. “Ultimately, the fight for reproductive freedom is also the fight for our democracy.”
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