Florida law enforcement officials are investigating voters who signed petitions to put a high-profile abortion-rights measure on this fall’s ballot, in what activists say is voter intimidation and that the petitioners made unannounced visits to people’s homes.
Organizers gathered more than 900,000 signatures in January to pass a bill enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution. Although the deadline for challenging the signatures has passed, a state agency set up by Governor DeSantis to investigate voter fraud recently began investigating whether there were irregularities in the signature-gathering process.
Isaac Menashe, a Fort Myers voter, said he signed the petition when he was approached at a local farm stand a few months ago. He wrote down his name, date of birth and address, then scribbled down a quick version of his signature. He didn’t think much of it until a police officer came to his house last week, took out a copy of the petition signature and asked him to verify it was his. And it was.
“I was shaken by this experience. What troubled me was that he had a file with about 10 pages of my personal information. I saw a copy of my driver’s license and a copy of the petition I signed,” Menashe wrote in a Facebook post last week. “It was clear that significant effort was made to verify that I had genuinely signed the petition. It is disturbing that so many resources were expended on this. I wonder if the same would be said if the petition had been about an innocuous issue.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has defended the investigation. “They’re doing what they’re supposed to do,” he said at a press conference on Monday, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “The signatures may be completely different and the voter may say, ‘No, I actually did it.’ Maybe they signed it under their own name. That’s absolutely possible. And if they say that, I think that’s probably the end of it.”
But the investigation comes amid other aggressive efforts by DeSantis and the Florida Republican Party to block the amendment, which would need 60% of voters’ support to pass this fall. The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, a state agency, posted a webpage last week attacking the amendment, but DeSantis has denied it was campaigning. Civil rights groups sued the state on Thursday over the agency’s messaging about the amendment.
The Florida Supreme Court also allowed misleading economic impact statements to be printed on the ballot alongside proposed amendments.
Local election officials in Florida are responsible for verifying the signatures that are submitted, and the groups sponsoring the petitions are responsible for covering the costs of the rigorous process of matching voter signatures with those stored in registration files and verifying names, addresses and dates of birth, said Polk County Elections Supervisor Lori Edwards. (Edwards said the state has not requested any information from her office about the abortion amendment.)
The Election Crimes and Security Bureau, the first multimillion-dollar agency created by DeSantis to investigate voter fraud, said earlier this year that it was seeing “an alarming influx of fraud related to constitutional petitions.”
A spokesman for Mary Jane Arrington, the elections supervisor in Osceola County in central Florida, told The Associated Press that she had never been asked to review signatures that were already valid in her 16 years in the job.
Florida Democrats and voting groups have slammed Governor DeSantis, calling the investigation a clear attempt at voter intimidation.
“This is all a stunt, an intimidation of voters as they head to the polls,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said at a press conference Monday.
In a letter to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement this summer, the state government said it had launched an investigation into more than 40 people who were paid to distribute abortion-focused petitions. The letter also said the department had received “credible information” that several petition distributors in Palm Beach County had submitted forged signatures.
The letter said local election officials had received signed complaints from voters who claimed they had not actually signed the petitions. “Some of the circulators mentioned above signed petitions on behalf of individuals who were deceased at the time the petitions were purportedly signed. It appears that the circulators forged voters’ signatures and inserted voters’ personal information into the petitions without their consent,” the letter said.
The State Department provided copies of the allegedly fraudulent petitions, in which signatures and voter information had been redacted, and also released three complaints from voters who said they had not actually signed the petitions.
“We have a duty to seek justice for Floridians who have been victimized by fraud and to protect the integrity of Florida’s elections. We will continue this investigation and report back to the Florida Elections Commission as appropriate,” Florida State Department spokesman Mark Ard said in a statement.
The campaign behind the amendment, Florida People for Freedom, outsourced much of the signature-gathering to a private firm called PCI Consultants. In an interview, the company’s president, Angelo Paparella, said the firm vetted all of the signatures it collected before submitting them to local election officials. It found a small percentage of the more than 1 million signatures it collected that looked fraudulent, so it submitted them separately and flagged them as suspicious.
“My staff is pretty good at finding this out,” said Paparella, who has been collecting signatures in Florida since 1998. “Sometimes people are stupid and try to take a shortcut by pulling names out of the phone book. That’s very stupid. It’s a crime.”
Still, he said the amount of fraud was minor compared to the overwhelming number of valid signatures submitted.
“If anyone is caught committing forgery, they should be prosecuted,” he said. “This does nothing to change the value of the nearly 1 million valid signatures the county found.”
It’s unclear how many voters were surveyed in the abortion petition survey, but the Tampa Bay Times reported that at least six counties had been asked to provide information about signatures that had already been approved.
One of those counties is Alachua County, where state officials have requested a review of 6,141 petitions, all submitted by six circulators who the state believes submitted fraudulent petitions. In Osceola County, the state has requested a review of about 1,850 petitions from specific circulators, Arrington’s office said. In Hillsborough County, officials want to review about 7,000 petitions submitted to the state, the elections commissioner’s office said.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, the state has requested a review of 17,000 signatures in Palm Beach County, and 11,500 petitions in Orange County, where Orlando is located.
The investigation is the latest attack by the Election Crimes and Security Bureau, whose work has been criticized because voter fraud is so rare. In 2022, the bureau came under fire for arresting people with felony convictions who voted but were apparently confused about their eligibility. It is also considering fining voter registration groups that make relatively minor errors. Many voter registration groups have since ceased operations in Florida.
“It’s been clear from day one that the election police’s goal was to harass voters who don’t share the same views as the governor,” said Brad Ashwell, Florida director of the voting rights group All Voting Is Local.
“By pursuing the Amendment 4 petition, which is already on the ballot, Governor DeSantis is undermining the will of the voters and trampling their democratic freedoms for his own political gain.”
