I’m sure you’ve heard Trump bellowing his fatuous nonsense about how everyone always wanted Roe overturned so it could go back to the states where people can vote on it and “it’s a beautiful thing.” I’ll admit that I was derelict in seeing where this was going. Leave it to Ron DeSantis to show the way:
Florida voters who signed a petition to place a pro-choice abortion referendum on the ballot this November say they have been visited by police who are investigating claims of fraud at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, the Tampa Bay Times reported Saturday.
Last year, DeSantis, a Republican, signed into a law a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. In response, pro-choice campaigners gathered and submitted nearly one million signatures to place on the ballot Amendment 4, a referendum that would overturn the ban and restore reproductive rights in the state.
Now Florida’s Department of State is claiming it suspects fraud in the signature-gathering process. In an email to county election officials, the department’s Brad McVay requested that they hand over their already-verified petitions so that the signatures can be reexamined, claiming without evidence that those who circulated the petitions “represent known or suspected fraudsters,” Tampa Bay television station WTVT reported.
Isaac Menasche, a voter who signed a petition to place the abortion referendum on the ballot, told the Times that he too was contacted by people working for the Florida governor’s office. According to Menasche, a plainclothes police officer came to his home to question him, apparently seeking to verify that the signature on the petition was indeed his.“I’m not a person who is going out there protesting for abortion,” Menasche told the newspaper. “I just felt strongly and I took the opportunity when the person asked me, to say yeah, I’ll sign that petition.”
Another voter, Becky Castellanos, told the Times that she was visited by a state police officer who interrogated her about a family member’s petition signature. She said the incident felt intimidating. “It didn’t surprise me that they were doing something like this to try to debunk these petitions to get it taken off of the ballot,” she told the outlet.
This is the work of DeSantis’s Stasi-style “Office of Election Crimes and Security” which has over a million dollars at its disposal to intimidate voters.
Of course they would claim voter fraud. That’s how they will be able to rationalize these ballot measures showing support for reproductive rights. I don’t know what the chances are of them removing it from the ballot. But they really don’t have to. All they need to do is claim that the vote was “stolen” — as all votes that don’t go their way these days — and they will have at least set the stage for more attempts to ban abortion. I’m sure we’ll see more of this.
Update. Oh right. We already are: