Photo: Protestors rally for abortion rights in Florida. Liberation photo
On election night, despite receiving 57% of the vote, a ballot measure which would have restored abortion rights for Floridians failed.
As a consequence, millions of Floridians will continue to suffer under a six-week abortion ban, a deadly policy that effectively makes abortion access out of reach for most women and others who require access to reproductive care. Most Floridians do not want to live under this policy, but because of the undemocratic nature of our current system, all Floridians do.
Under Florida law, ballot measures require 60% of the total vote to pass. In 2006, this supermajority rule was instituted explicitly in order to make it more difficult for Florida voters to make changes to their constitution — an obstacle to democratic control that state Republicans have even been trying to heighten in recent years by raising the threshold to 66.67%. It is also the highest threshold an abortion initiative has faced since the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the unelected Supreme Court in 2022. Before this election cycle, every state abortion initiative that was brought to a vote had succeeded — whether those states were majority Republican or Democrat — demonstrating that abortion rights are popular across all lines of division. In fact, even though the amendment failed in Florida, it still received more votes than either of the two-party candidates, beating support for Vice President Harris’s presidential bid by 14 points.
However, sensing the overwhelming popular support for abortion rights in Florida, as well as the consistent success in both “blue” and “red” states of similar campaigns, the ruling class employed highly undemocratic tactics to undermine the people’s voice on this issue.
The Florida governor and his allies falsely accused organizers of submitting forged petition signatures, sent police to the homes of voters who had signed the petition, used state funds to spread misinformation about the amendment on television and radio, and threatened TV stations that aired pro-amendment ads with criminal penalties. When voters finally went to cast their ballots, they were met with a legally dubious and highly misleading “Financial Impact Statement” claiming that restoring abortion access could lead to serious costs for the state. This despite the fact that, since abortion was previously legal up to 24 weeks in Florida, the financial impact of legal abortions is actually very well understood. Working people understand these tactics for what they are — voter suppression and manipulation by the ruling class.
It is important to remember that the right-wing forces in Florida would never have had this opportunity to undermine the public will if the Democratic Party had followed through on its decades-long promise to protect abortion access. The failure of the Democratic Party to provide federal protection to abortion access, while continuing year after year to court votes and donations by paying lip service to women’s rights, makes them complicit in this outcome.
Under our current system, our rights are never secure, even when they are popularly supported and the consequences of losing them are catastrophic for working people. Undemocratic voting rules, aggressive voter suppression, and open contempt for the popular will are neither new nor special — they are the way the capitalist state is designed to function. Working people need to respond to this in the only way that has ever worked — by getting organized, fighting back, and demanding a system that is based on the people’s will and needs.
