Gabrielle Russon
Florida Democrats are demanding a federal investigation as they accuse Gov. Ron DeSantis of abusing his power to fight against the abortion rights initiative in the November election.
“Governor DeSantis, who has been vocal about his opposition to Amendment 4, has leveraged his government to sabotage, suppress votes, and campaign against it,” said a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland from U.S. Reps. Maxwell Frost and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
“We urge your department to launch an investigation into the DeSantis administration’s anti-democratic actions. Floridians, including the hundreds of thousands who contributed a signature in the hopes that they could vote to restore women’s right to bodily autonomy, deserve the freedom to cast a ballot in November untainted by illegal political ploys.”
This week DeSantis claimed some of the campaign’s petitions that helped put the abortion rights initiative on the ballot are fraud.
“They had submitted petitions on behalf of dead voters. That has been substantiated,” DeSantis said Tuesday. “We now know that there are signatures that have been accepted by some of the Supervisors that don’t match the voter file, so they are investigating this, as they should.”
“Our tolerance for voter fraud in the state of Florida is zero,” he added.
DeSantis’ attacks come seven months after the petitions were validated by local and state election officials. The Amendment 4 campaign said DeSantis’ claims are politically motivated to distract from the issue of reproductive freedom and the state’s current six-week abortion ban.
The Tampa Bay Times reported that elections police are knocking on some petition-signers’ doors to investigate whether some signatures were fraudulent.
“Many Floridians who signed the petition have reported that police have come to their house, some with copies of their birth certificates and other official documents related to them, to verify their signature,” the Florida Democrats wrote to Garland.
“Residents say that these encounters left them feeling ‘shaken’ and ‘intimidated.’ Election supervisors for the regions these reports originated from were not notified police were knocking doors. A supervisor from an impacted district expressed confusion as to how houses were selected, given the request his office received from the administration was for a single signature.”
DeSantis’ Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
To read the full letter, go here.
