( NewsNation ) — Police in Florida are showing up at voters’ homes to confirm whether they signed a petition seeking to get an abortion rights amendment on the ballot.
The state health care agency also created a website targeting the ballot initiative . The homepage reads, “Florida is Protecting Life. Don’t let the fearmongers lie to you.” It also claims the proposed measure “threatens women’s safety.”
The ballot initiative —Amendment 4 — would keep abortion legal in Florida until the fetus is viable, bucking the state’s six-week ban. Sixty percent of voters would need to approve of the measure for it to pass.
On Monday, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defended police visiting petition signers’ homes, saying he wants November’s election to remain fair. Critics, however, say the petition investigation and anti-Amendment 4 website are efforts to intimidate voters and block access to abortion.
Project 2025: Here’s what Harris and Trump said during the debate What is Amendment 4?
The proposed amendment says, “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 passed, parents would need to be notified before a child in their care could receive an abortion — an exception that’s already laid out in the state’s constitution.
Florida currently bans most abortions after six weeks, legislation that was passed after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Many people don’t yet know they’re pregnant at that stage.
A majority of Florida voters say they back a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution, according to new polling released Friday by The Hill and Emerson College Polling.
Fifty-five percent of likely Florida voters said they would vote “yes” on Amendment 4. Another 26% said they plan to vote “no,” while 20% said they were “unsure.”
Why is Florida investigating petition signatures?
DeSantis and other supporters of the effort say they want to keep elections fair.
“There was a lot of complaints about this one group that was supporting Amendment 4 for a wide variety of reasons,” DeSantis told a crowd during a Monday appearance. “It turns out — they looked — this group submitted dozens of petitions on behalf of dead people…there are other petitions that have actually been validated where the signatures do not match the voter files.”
In January, state elections officials confirmed more than 997,000 verified signatures — 100,000 more than were required. With less than eight weeks until the election, those who support the amendment say the petition investigation is little more than political interference.
“Amendment 4 was placed on the ballot by nearly one million Floridians around the state and across party lines who believe that people, not politicians, deserve the freedom to make their own health care decisions,” Lauren Brenzel, the director of the Yes on 4 campaign, said in an email to The Associated Press . “But the State will stop at nothing to keep in place their near-total abortion ban.”
DeSantis signed a law in 2022 creating a state police force to investigate voter fraud and election crimes, which is rare and often isolated.
Now, Florida’s Office of Election Crimes and Security says it’s “concerned” about allegations election supervisors verified fake signatures on a petition that qualified the proposed amendment to appear on the November ballot. That’s according to a letter from Deputy Secretary of State Brad McVay that the AP obtained.
Judges in Florida have previously dismissed criminal cases that the state’s Office of Election Crimes and Security initiated. A series of arrests in 2022 predominately involved people convicted of certain felonies that prevented the restoration of their voting rights .
The AP investigated voter fraud claims tied to the 2020 presidential election. It found fewer than 475 potential cases of voter fraud out of 25.5 million ballots cast in the six states where Trump and his allies disputed his loss.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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