UPDATE:
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Republicans around the country are working hard to find pretexts for removing abortion amendments from the ballot, because they’re so worried about being wiped out by women in the general election. And of course Ron DeSantis is leading the charge. Via the Washington Post:
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.”
And look what John “Jay” Ashcroft is up to in Missouri. He dumped the same petition whose signatures he already certified based on his own volition. Via KY3.com:
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KY3) – A motion was filed Monday after Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft tried to get the abortion amendment off of the November ballot.
On Monday, Ashcroft sent a letter to Tori Schafer, a lawyer for the woman who proposed the amendment, stating that his office has decertified the Amendment 3 petition for the Nov. 5 ballot. He claimed that the amendment would be decertified over “serious concern about whether the proposed petition satisfies the legal requirements for adequate notice to the public.”
Shortly after the letter was made public, a motion was filed by the defendants in the case to hold Ashcroft in contempt of court. The filing stated that when the court stayed the judgment, no party was to take any action “until further order of the court” and that less than 24 hours later, Ashcroft sent his letter, which the motion claims is “directly contrary to the court’s order.”
The motion states that “Ashcroft should be held in contempt and ordered to maintain the status quo and rescind his contumacious letter. To the extent that the Secretary has advised any local election officials or others of his September 9 letter, this Court should require him to notify all necessary public officials that his letter is void and that Amendment 3 remains on the ballot until further order of the court.”
The 10 states that will be voting on abortion this year are: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. Organizers in another state, Arkansas, collected signatures to add an abortion-rights initiative to the ballot, but the state rejected the proposal—a decision that was upheld by the Arkansas supreme court in August.
