The Florida Department of State says it is looking for fraud during the examination of thousands of petition signatures used to get an abortion amendment on the November ballot.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Brad McVay, deputy secretary of state for legal affairs and elections integrity, made the requests to election supervisors in Hillsborough, Orange, Osceola and Palm Beach counties to gather roughly 36,000 signatures for the state to review.
The signatures were among the nearly 1 million collected to permit Amendment 4 to appear before Florida voters in November.
The amendment would protect abortion access and undo the state’s six-week abortion ban.
In part, the proposal says that 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.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis is among the opponents of the amendment.
Floridians Protecting Freedom is the political committee spearheading the drive to get the proposal on the ballot.
