This week the Florida Supreme Court made two significant rulings on abortion in the state. First, the court ruled that the state's constitution does not protect abortion, paving the path for a restrictive six-week abortion ban to go into effect. In a separate ruling, the court granted Florida voters the opportunity to vote on a November referendum aimed at safeguarding access to abortion. Pro-choice voters and democratic strategists have responded to the news of the referendum with optimistic hope that Floridians will have their say in the fall and democracy will ultimately prevail. Some have even gone as far to predict a backlash from voters that would hand the state to Joe Biden in the general election. Amid these hopeful murmurs lies a stark reality: the erosion of voter rights orchestrated by Governor Ron DeSantis, which disproportionately impacts communities of color, immigrants, low-income people, women, college voters, and LGBTQ people. Florida's record of voter suppression, which has been deemed racially discriminatoryby advocacy groups and the Justice Department, stands in the way of voters exercising their right to protect themselves from the state's anti-abortion agenda.
Floridians have reason to be hopeful about the ballot referendum on abortion, known as Amendment 4. Ballot referendums protecting abortion access have proven to be a winning strategy post-Dobbs. Even in conservative states like Ohio and Kentucky, voters have resoundingly voted in favor of safeguarding abortion. Florida has become an unlikely bastion for abortion care in the deep South where thousands of pregnant people have traveled to the state to access abortion care in the last year. With the six-week abortion ban soon going into effect, the nearest state to access abortion for people living in the southeast will be North Carolina, posing a significant barrier to care for marginalized and economically disadvantaged groups. Pro-choice advocates in the state are encouraged by polling data that suggests that a majority of Floridians favor abortion being legal and also look to the Florida electorate's history of voting to protect abortion rights. However, the odds of winning the referendum vote should not be overestimated. The influx of migration from Northeasterners and Midwesterners to Florida since the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an increase of registered Republican voters. Moreover, the referendum requires a supermajority of 60 percent of voters to pass. Perhaps the biggest obstacle for passing the amendment is the state's successful efforts of disenfranchisement and voter suppression.
White Christian nationalists and the GOP have made it clear for decades that they do not want everyone to vote. As Paul Weyrich, the late conservative political strategist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority stated in 1980, "Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
Former President Donald Trump and other GOP leaders agree, and since the Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder that gutted the Voting Rights Act, we have seen conservative state governments throughout the country chipping away at voting rights through the strategy known as "radical incrementalism"–the same strategic approach that was eventually successful in overturning Roe v. Wade. In many ways DeSantis has led this crusade by rolling out restrictive voter ID laws, imposed limitations on mail-in ballots and voter registration drives, and closed polling places in low-income and Black neighborhoods. Florida does not allow same-day or automatic voter registration—initiatives that correlate with higher voter turnout for Black and Latinx voters and increased overall voter registration. Additionally, despite Florida voters passing an amendment allowing formerly incarcerated persons to automatically have their voting eligibility reinstated after the completion of parole or probation, the Florida legislature passed a bill requiring that all court-ordered financial obligations must be completed first. A move that shows that the Florida legislature is experienced in inventing ways to go against the wishes of their own voters, and potentially foreshadowing future machinations.
All of these restrictions have been orchestrated in order to disenfranchise communities of color, immigrants, low-income people, women, college voters, and LGBTQ people. And—surprise, surprise—these often are the groups that tend to be more progressive on issues such as abortion access. Furthermore, abortion access can be critical for the lives of some people in these groups, and experts know that being low-income correlates with limited access to medical care, including abortions. Due to structural inequalities in our society, all of the aforementioned groups, with the exception of college voters, are more likely to be low-income. These are the voices that Ron DeSantis and his GOP counterparts have sought to silence, robbing them of their fundamental right to have a say in their own futures. It is a double-assault from a party that espouses the virtues of democracy while actively suppressing it.
In a democracy undermined by voter suppression, we should not put too much faith in a broken electoral process or buy into the seductive illusion of voter choice. Instead, we should work tirelessly to bolster and expand voting rights ensuring that every voice is heard and every vote counts.
Marya T. Mtshali, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of sociology and a C. Graydon and Mary E. Rogers faculty fellow at Bucknell University, as well as a former postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School. Her areas of expertise include intersectionality, inequality, and political sociology. Her work has been published in Vox, The Nation, Cosmopolitan, Tampa Bay Times, and Ms. Magazine.
Katharine McCabe, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of women's and gender studies at Bucknell University. She is a sociologist whose research focuses on the reproductive health experiences of marginalized groups and the criminalization of care in the U.S. Her work has been published in Ms. Magazine.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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