DeSantis election police question people who signed abortion ballot petition

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s election police unit is investigating alleged fraud in signature gathering for the state’s upcoming abortion referendum in a move that critics say is designed to intimidate voters.

In the past week, two people reported that an agent from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrived at their homes and asked them about petitions they had signed months ago to add Amendment 4 to the November ballot.

One voter, Isaac Menasche, posted on his Facebook page Wednesday that a detective questioned him about his signature and showed him a folder containing 10 pages of his personal information.

“The experience left me shaken,” Menasche wrote, adding that he had signed the petition. “Troubling that so much resources were devoted to this.”

Menasche confirmed the content of the post to The Washington Post but declined to comment further.

The probe comes as Democrats and election experts express concern that DeSantis is using the powers of the state to derail the referendum, which would nullify a six-week abortion ban the Republican governor signed into law last year. The state’s health care agency recently launched a website that claims the amendment “threatens women’s safety.”

“They want people to stay home and to not vote,” Democratic state Rep. Fentrice Driskell said at a virtual news conference Monday. “They want people to read these articles and hear it on social media that the police showed up at somebody’s door and intimidated them and made them feel bad about signing an Amendment 4 petition.”

DeSantis, for his part, defended the actions of his election police unit, saying Monday the state received “a lot of complaints” about a petition-gathering group. He said the group had submitted “dozens of petitions” on behalf of dead people. He did not name the group, and a Florida Department of State spokesperson declined to answer a request for more details, pointing only to DeSantis’s remarks on the issue.

“They’re doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re following the law, and they’re ensuring that anyone that broke the law is going to be held accountable,” DeSantis said. “Our tolerance in the state of Florida for any type of election related fraud is zero.”

Although confirmed cases of voter fraud in Florida and across the country are rare, DeSantis urged the legislature to create the Office of Election Crimes and Security Unit in 2022. The unit has fielded thousands of complaints since then but has reported only a few dozen arrests.

Many of the arrests involve formerly incarcerated people accused of breaking the law by casting a ballot. Florida restored voting rights for most felons through a constitutional referendum in 2018, except those who had been charged with murder or felony sexual offenses. Several of those charged said they were unaware certain felons could not vote and that they applied for voter registration cards, which the state granted.

A number of their cases were initially dismissed by judges on grounds that the statewide prosecutor did not have jurisdiction over the cases. Lawmakers in the Republican-controlled legislature later changed state law to ensure that the prosecutor did have the right to pursue those cases.

Proponents of the abortion rights amendment were required to collect 891,523 signatures verified by the state Division of Elections by Feb. 1 to place the amendment on the ballot.

Floridians Protecting Freedom, the umbrella group that helped coordinate the signature collection effort across the state, said it gathered more than 1 million petition signatures for the amendment a month before the deadline. The state verified 910,946 of those signatures in January.

Elections investigators began reviewing petitions last year for proposed ballot issues including the abortion rights proposal, but also other measures, such as an upcoming vote on recreational marijuana.

In February and March, the agency announced charges against three people accused of submitting 50 fraudulent petitions for the abortion amendment. The FDLE said two of those people had used the names of dead people on “multiple constitutional amendment initiatives.” The investigations of the two people began before the Amendment 4 petition drive began.

The DeSantis administration has challenged the abortion referendum in court with mixed results. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody succeeded in having a financial impact statement placed on the ballot. The state Supreme Court approved the financial language last month.

But the same court, where DeSantis appointees make up the majority, also surprised the governor’s administration when it allowed the abortion amendment to go on the ballot.

Floridians Protecting Freedom hired PCI Consultants to do most of the petition-gathering. PCI president Angelo Paparella said about 1,000 paid canvassers, along with hundreds of volunteers, collected more than 1.3 million signatures. He said about 1 million were valid registered voters and that a “very small number” were turned over to elections supervisors on suspicion of being fraudulent.

Paparella’s California-based company has been collecting signatures for Florida ballot initiatives since 1998.

“If we suspected fraud, we proactively turned those over to the county,” he said. “It’s such a small number, and we catch a lot of it. The counties check if the signatures match. Anybody committing fraud, it’s just a really stupid crime. It’s very time consuming, and they’re not making that much money. They may as well just do it the right way.”