Florida’s Deadly Abortion Ban Will Remain Thanks to Cruel Ballot Rule

Floridians failed to enshrine abortion access in the state constitution Tuesday, with the majority of the population still failing to clear the 60 percent supermajority requirement for the ballot measure.

The Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion sought to protect an individual’s right to an abortion up to the point of viability, which typically occurs between 23 and 24 weeks of pregnancy. The measure also would have safeguarded the right to an abortion in the event that the procedure is deemed medically necessary in order to preserve a pregnant person’s health.

But the initiative faced dire odds: In order to be amended into the state constitution, it needed more than a simple majority of voters in order to succeed, effectively handing the minority of Floridians the ability to decide the fate of women in the conservative hub.

More than 5,600,000 Floridians voted in favor of Amendment 4—approximately 57.2 percent—with 82 percent of the expected votes in, according to a projection by NBC News.

Just one week out from Election Day, pollsters predicted that the abortion rights effort would go south. A survey from St. Pete Polls of 1,227 likely Florida general election voters, conducted for FloridaPolitics.com, suggested that the measure would fall just shy of its goal with 54 percent of the vote.

Florida has one of the most prohibitive abortion policies in the nation, restricting access after just six weeks. That law, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis during his campaign for president, went into effect in May. DeSantis’s decision was viewed as a strategic move that could have proved popular with some voters in swing states such as Iowa, but that bid fell apart when DeSantis announced in January that he would be withdrawing from the presidential race—leaving Floridians holding the bag.

Florida’s law prohibits abortions well before a lot of people even realize they’re pregnant, and just one week before drugstore pregnancy tests can detect pregnancy hormones in their earliest, and least reliable, window. It has also forced some patients in need of the procedure to seek treatment outside the state—such as in North Carolina, where abortion is banned after 12 weeks—or even further afield.

In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion efforts have won in every state where the issue has appeared on the ballot. Florida is one of 10 states that put that metric to the test this year, though it is the only state that requires more than a simple majority to pass.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein has won the governor’s seat in the Tar Heel State, securing more than 105,000 votes Tuesday night.

As polls had predicted, Stein swept the state, clinching a 15-point lead over his Republican opponent, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, according to a polling average by The Hill/Decision Desk HQ.

Stein ran a relatively quiet campaign against Robinson, sticking to core policy points that he believed would win over North Carolinians: economic equity, investments in the state’s school system, health care, abortion, and community safety.

But the waning days of the race focused less on policy and more on a sudden mass turn in opinion on Robinson, with voters framing the race as a choice between “someone with decency” and a “frightening, horrifying” candidate.

Despite spending the better part of the last year spewing disturbing and outlandish rhetoric disparaging women and minority groups, Robinson was swept by an October surprise when CNN published a sprawling investigation about his pre-politics proclivities.

CNN connected Robinson to a flurry of comments on online pornographic forums via a “litany” of common biographical details and a shared email address. The comments revealed Robinson as a man who had, at least once, desired to own slaves, peeped in women’s locker rooms, and enjoyed transgender porn.

Robinson subsequently rejected legal aid and several offers to help him track down the original source of the comments, leading to a mass exodus by members of his top staff in the final stretch of the race.

Weeks later, at a sparsely attended news conference, Robinson and his attorney Jesse Binnall announced their intention to sue the “left-wing” news outlet for defamation, seeking $50 million in damages for “reputational harm” over what he described as a “high-tech lynching.” Two weeks ago, Robinson tweaked that number, quietly amending the lawsuit to instead seek just over $25,000 in damages.

Even Donald Trump’s campaign had seemingly pulled their support from Robinson, reportedly telling the Hitler-quoting, gay-bashing, conspiracy-flouting antisemite September that he was no longer welcome to attend rallies for either candidate on the Republican presidential ticket, according to an anonymous source that spoke with the Carolina Journal. Local Republican strategists had also reportedly called on Robinson to exit the gubernatorial race in order to save Trump’s chances in the battleground state.

But, as Stein argued, Robinson was “unfit to be governor before that story even broke.”

The exceedingly controversial politico has had near countless headline-grabbing scandals based on his disturbing online history, which included posts in which he minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, claimed a “satanic marxist” had made the movie Black Panther to pull “shekels” out of Black audiences, likened women getting abortions to murderers (despite admitting that his wife had an abortion), and derided gay people as “filth” and “maggots.” Robinson has also expressed archaic views about women’s role in society, telling a Charlotte-area church in 2022 that Christians are “called to be led by men.”

Robinson had also suggested that “schools wouldn’t be getting shot up” if Christian teachings were forced into the classroom, and told a congregation at Asbury Baptist Church that public schools had taken a “nosedive” since mandatory prayer had been excised from curriculums.

But Robinson rejected the mounting pressure to exit the race, even as his campaign seemed like a surefire loss for Republicans in battleground state.

Extreme wait times to vote in a Pennsylvania county couldn’t sway a judge to extend voting hours on Tuesday.

Despite reports that lines near Lehigh University in Bethlehem had estimated wait times longer than six hours, a judge in Northampton County refused to locally extend the state’s 8:00 p.m. poll closing time. Bethlehem stretches across the boundaries of Northampton and Lehigh Counties, both of which sided with President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Voters in line before the 8 p.m. deadline will still be permitted to vote, according to the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

The Keystone State is expected to be a pivotal battleground race in the 2024 election. Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are projected to be neck and neck in Pennsylvania, with the Democratic presidential nominee just a smidge ahead of her Republican opponent at 47.9 percent to Trump’s 47.7 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s aggregated polling.

Donald Trump has claimed Indiana, winning 11 electoral votes over Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the Associated Press. It’s the third time that Trump has won the historically conservative state.

While Harris was never projected to win the Hoosier State, one early bellwether of the national results did look up for the Democratic presidential nominee, however. Hamilton County, a suburb that Trump won by seven percentage points in 2020, sided with Harris on Tuesday, giving the Democrat a 1.2 percent lead with 65 percent of the vote tabulated, according to The New York Times.

Right-wing conspiracy theories began circulating Tuesday evening after election officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, announced that they would need to recount approximately 31,000 ballots.

Several hours into counting votes, election officials realized that some of the doors on the tabulation machines “were not fully secured” by senior election officials, according to a statement from the Milwaukee Election Commission.

“In order to eliminate any doubt and be fully transparent, the MEC has decided to start the tabulation process over for all ballots at Central Count,” accounting for approximately 31,000 votes, the statement said.

The recount will significantly delay results out of Wisconsin, which was previously expected to give partial results Tuesday night. In 2020, President Joe Biden won Milwaukee County.

Republican National Committee co-chair and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump posted about the issue on X Tuesday evening, claiming that her team had been “monitoring slow ballot counting in Milwaukee” and had learned that the “counting took place in unsecured conditions.”

“This is an unacceptable example of incompetent election administration in a key swing state: voters deserve better and we are unambiguously calling on Milwaukee’s officials to DO THEIR JOBS and count ballots quickly and effectively. Anything less undermines voter confidence,” she wrote.

Her post was shared by RNC co-Chair Michael Whatley and Trump campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz. Earlier Tuesday, Lara Trump had stoked concerns over voting in Pennsylvania, another key swing state.

It seems that undermining voter confidence has already taken root. CNN’s report on the issue in Milwaukee was shared by hatemongering X account LibsofTikTok, which regularly promotes misinformation and extremist conspiracy theories, sparking right-wing speculation that something more sinister was afoot.