Seven of the 10 states with abortion on the ballot chose to protect the right Tuesday — and Florida would have too, if it wasn’t subject to a 60-vote supermajority threshold.
Missouri became the first state to overturn a near-total abortion ban (while also voting in staunch anti-abortion Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO)).
Voters in New York, Maryland, Colorado, Arizona, Montana and Nevada voted resoundingly to enshrine the right in their state constitutions.
And while a similar measure in Florida was defeated Tuesday, a majority voted for it. Well over half of voters in Florida — 57 percent with about 94 percent of votes tallied — supported the constitutional amendment, but Republican legislators had previously raised the threshold for citizen-initiated amendments to 60 percent, not a simple majority. A similar threshold would have thwarted abortion measures in other states, including Ohio, which approved its measure in 2023 by right around the same percent of the vote that Florida delivered on Tuesday.
Florida’s measure, known as Amendment 4, was also up against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who used taxpayer dollars and his agencies to run a ubiquitous disinformation campaign, claiming that the amendment would harm women. He also threatened television stations that ran ads favoring the amendment and used the Office of Election Crimes and Security to run a “voter fraud” investigation into petition signatures. Police officers actually showed up at people’s doors to ask for verification.
“These are petitions that were already approved, that were done properly,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told reporters at the time. “This police intimidation tactic is clearly intended to chill the democratic process.”
In Nebraska, which had dueling amendments, voters picked the restriction on any abortions after the first trimester (with narrow exceptions) by a bare 51 percent. South Dakota rejected its abortion rights amendment more emphatically, by 60 percent. These are the first states post-Dobbs to reject abortion rights amendments by a simple majority.
