Florida pro-lifers filed a lawsuit Wednesday against a pro-abortion group found to have engaged in fraudulent practices to put on the ballot a radical amendment legalizing abortion up to birth.
Alan Lawson, a lawyer who is a former Florida Supreme Court justice, filed the lawsuit against the group Floridians Protecting Freedom on behalf of four state residents to challenge the validity of Amendment 4, the Washington Examiner first reported.
If the suit succeeds, the pro-abortion measure would be removed from the Nov. 5 ballot in Florida.
“Irrespective of what a Floridian believes about the merits of this amendment and abortion in general, every Floridian ought to want to protect their [state] Constitution from fraud and criminal activity,” Lawson told the Examiner.
According to a Friday report from the Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security, more than 100 paid petition circulators associated with Floridians Protecting Freedom engaged in fraudulent practices to get the amendment on the ballot.
If approved by voters, the initiative would amend the Florida Constitution to prohibit restrictions on abortion when “necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s health care provider.”
Because the text of the constitutional amendment contains no definition of “health” or “health care provider,” the measure likely would legalize abortion at any stage of pregnancy if anyone who claims medical expertise asserts that the mother would benefit physically, emotionally, or otherwise.
Illegal activities by Floridians Protecting Freedom include forging signatures, misrepresenting voter information, and using personal identifying information without consent, the Office of Election Crimes and Security’s 348-page interim report says.
Many of the petition forms collected were erroneously validated, allowing fraudulent submissions to slip through existing checks, the office said. The allegations could affect more than 1,500 voters across 35 counties in Florida.
During late 2023 and early 2024, the Office of Election Crimes and Security received a high number of complaints about Floridians Protecting Freedom. Two paid petition circulators for the organization were arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced for felonies involving election fraud early this year.
“In addition to the arrests, OECS has, to date, opened well more than 100 preliminary criminal investigations into individual paid petition circulators and organizations involved in the collection of petitions on behalf of [Floridians Protecting Freedom],” the report says. “Given the credibility of the allegations, OECS has referred over a hundred individual FPF cases to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which is actively pursuing dozens of criminal investigations together with the [state attorney general’s] Office of Statewide Prosecution.”
Floridians Protecting Freedom gathered more than 900,000 signatures to put Amendment 4 on the ballot. The OECS report concludes that 16.4% of the signatures may be invalid.
“Each of these petitions could correspond to a Floridian who (unbeknownst to him or her) is a victim of felony election fraud,” Brad McVay, Florida’s deputy secretary of state for legal affairs and election integrity, said in the report’s cover letter. “This illegal scheme is likely driving the petition fraud outlined above. If a circulator is paid per signature, circulators are incentivized to forge as many signatures as possible to make a quick and easy buck.”
In September, the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis asked law enforcement to “prioritize” the investigation into what may be “fraudulent” signatures on petitions, according to a letter shared with The Daily Signal.
The report from the Office of Election Crimes and Security asserts that Floridians Protecting Freedom submitted petition forms on behalf of more than 20 individuals who are dead.
The Florida election office also found that registered circulators were hiring unregistered individuals to collect signatures, violating state laws requiring registered circulators to oversee the signing process.
“Both the unregistered circulators who circulated petitions for compensation and the registered petition circulators who hired them committed crimes, and petition forms collected in this manner are invalid,” the report says.
Some paid petition circulators had criminal histories and were not Florida residents, the report says.
Circulators reportedly altered completed forms to fill in missing information before submitting the forms, according to the Office of Election Crimes and Security. Some misrepresented the purpose of the petition to potential signers, leading to signatures being gathered under false pretenses.
Despite Florida’s attempts to combat petition fraud, the report says, Floridians Protecting Freedom’s agents compensated circulators based on the number of forms gathered—a third-degree felony in Florida.
California-based PCI Consultants Inc. conducted and oversaw the petition circulation campaign; campaign finance reports show that Floridians Protecting Freedom paid PCI Consultants more than $27 million in 2023 and 2024.
“Criminal intelligence generated by OECS, law enforcement, and the Office of Statewide Prosecution strongly indicates that multiple subcontractors engaged by PCI Consultants paid individual circulators per petition collected, in gross violation of Florida law,” the report says. “At least one of these subcontractors advertised the illegal payment scheme on social media websites.”
Floridians Protecting Freedom recently was fined $328,000 for election law violations and already has paid $22,000 in additional civil penalties, McVay writes in the OECS report.
The report from the Office of Election Crimes and Security recommends that Florida’s executive and legislative branches require paid petition circulators to be state residents and make convicted felons ineligible for these paid positions to prevent future fraud.
In an emailed statement to The Daily Signal, Floridians Protecting Freedom denied allegations of fraud.
“Ask yourself, why is this happening now, over half a year after over 997,000 petitions were verified by the state of Florida and now with less than a month until the election they want to revisit the petition collection process?” Hazel Smith, campaign director for Yes on 4, said. “Simply put, it’s because our campaign is winning and the government is trying to do everything it can to stop Floridians from having the rights they deserve.”
Some legal scholars oppose ballot questions because of fraud such as what Floridians Protecting Freedom is accused of engaging in, said Daniel J. Schmid, associate vice president of legal affairs at Liberty Counsel, an Orlando-based law firm specializing in religious freedom.
“It’s rife with fraud, and it’s difficult to identify in the best of circumstances, and we’re basing significant changes in the law off of petitioners, some of whom have a financial stake in the petition itself,” Schmid told The Daily Signal. “That creates a problem, and I guarantee it’s happened in other places, on the abortion amendments and others, but particularly on the abortion amendments because they are so insistent on maintaining the right to slaughter children.”
“In order to maintain the massive amounts of money that they retain because of this stuff, and to maintain the political power that they gain by it,” Schmid said, “they stop at nothing, up to and including fraud [in] the petition process.”