Committee aiming to put abortion rights on Florida's 2024 ballot claims over 1 million signatures

Sponsors of the proposed abortion-rights state constitutional amendment have collected over a million signatures, and they’re now focusing on meeting the geographic diversity threshold to get the amendment on the ballot in 2024.

By their count, the group Floridians Protecting Freedom has collected 1.4 million signatures and submitted 1.375 million to supervisors of elections in Florida’s counties for verification, campaign director Lauren Brenzel told the Florida Phoenix. That number surpasses the 891,523 needed by Feb. 1 for Floridians to decide whether they want to enshrine abortion in the state’s Constitution come November.

However, the Florida Division of Elections has verified 753,305 of those as of the latest updated count on Dec. 15. The count is updated every Friday starting this month. Since Dec. 1, the number of verified signatures has increased by 131,615.

“We’re sitting at about a 70 percent validation number, which is pretty standard for petition collection because there’s a lot of things that can impact whether or not a petition that gets collected gets counted. So, we don’t anticipate that our 1.4 million number will show up, but we anticipate that a high portion of that number will show up,” Brenzel said.

Districts to watch

The group has also collected signatures from at least eight percent of the people who voted in the last presidential election in eight of Florida’s congressional districts. They need to do the same in at least six more districts. Overall, there are 28 congressional districts.

The focus is now on CD 9 in Orange, Osceola and Polk counties; CD 16 in Hillsborough and Manatee counties; CD 22 in Palm Beach County and CD 23 also in Palm Beach and Broward County, Brenzel said. The number of additional verified signatures needed to meet the threshold in those districts ranges from 1,805 to 5,745, according to the Division of Elections. In CD 7, which comprises Seminole and Volusia counties, the proposed amendment needs 332 more signatures.

“For example, Congressional District 16, which is all of Manatee County and a sliver of Hillsborough County. That’s the one that I actually live in Tampa Bay, so this is the district that I am most involved with, and Manatee County is not an easy county,” said Amy Weintraub, reproductive rights director for Progress Florida, one of the organizations assisting in the petition drive. “It doesn’t have necessarily lots of huge events where it’s very easy for potential petition collectors to be outside the doors before they open and chat with people.

“It has been more of a challenge to find the reproductive rights supporters who live there. But, we’ve been using different tactics like lots of phone-calling, door-knocking, emailing and texting directly to voters who we think would be likely to sign if only they knew about the petition.”

Brenzel attributed the discrepancy between the verified number and the signatures they have gathered to a lag because people do the entire process. On their side, Floridians Protecting Freedom has volunteers to collect signatures, sort them and send them to supervisors of elections. This takes time because they have to calculate the amount of money they must send with each batch of petitions, which can range from $.10 to $1.49 per petition, Brenzel said. Then, employees at each county’s supervisor of elections must verify those signatures. The whole process can take up to 60 days, she said.

“It’s not the supervisor of elections doing anything wrong. They’re utilizing the 60 days to validate hundreds of thousands of petitions that come into their offices. But starting Dec. 1, when they receive a petition, they have 30 days to validate it and that’s the case through the Feb. 1 deadline,” she said. “So, it’s not a matter of them not reporting in a timely manner or doing anything wrong; it’s just a matter of they have to do a ton of work.”

Deadlines to meet

Still, the sponsors extended their self-imposed deadline from Dec. 16 to Dec. 22 asking people to mail petitions to their hub in Sarasota. The weather during the weekend led to event cancelations where volunteers planned to collect signatures, Weintraub said. This deadline would give them enough time to submit the petitions for verification 30 days ahead of the deadline.

The signature count won’t become official until Secretary of State Cord Byrd determines that, but Floridians Protecting Freedom doesn’t expect that all 1.4 million signatures will be verified, Brenzel said.

Even if the proposed amendment clears that hurdle, the Floria Supreme Court gets the final say in approving the language of the summary that would appear on the ballot. The summary must clearly tell voters what it would do and can only deal with one subject. Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody has already raised an issue with the summary’s use of the term “viability,” asking the court to block the proposed amendment because she said it’s not clear.

The summary reads: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.”

This story was first published at Florida Phoenix.