"The Will of the People," Except on Abortion

The GOP has pulled dirty tricks everywhere abortion is on the ballot

It can’t be easy for a Republican to read abortion polls these days. I imagine their stomach drops every time a new one comes out. Because while support for abortion rights has always been strong, now it’s downright astronomical: Americans overwhelmingly want abortion to be legal for any reason and available at any point in pregnancy.

Even as the GOP tries to grasp onto the hope that voters still want some kind of restriction, more polls arise to burst that bubble—showing that over 80% of Americans don’t want the government to be involved at all.

You’d think that when faced with this stark political reality, Republicans might consider changing their abortion policies to be more in line with what the country wants. We know stories of raped children and women going septic don’t move them, but if anything could bring a tear to the GOP’s eye it’s lost elections.

Instead, Republicans made a political calculation anyone could have seen coming: they’re trying to stop Americans from voting on abortion. After all, it doesn’t matter what the polls say if voters don’t have a choice to begin with.

In Montana this week, the Republican Secretary of State’s office started removing voters’ names from a petition to get abortion on the November ballot. The Daily Montanan reports that Christi Jacobsen’s office is tossing the signatures of registered voters, claiming that they’re ‘inactive’ and therefore ineligible to sign ballot petitions as ‘qualified electors.’

What makes someone an ‘inactive’ voter in Montana? Not much. You’re deemed ‘inactive’ if you didn’t cast a ballot in the previous federal general election and neglected to return an election notice confirming your current address. Tellingly, inactive voters have been considered ‘qualified electors’ able to sign ballot petitions for years in Montana. It’s just now, coincidentally, that Republicans decided those signatures shouldn’t be counted.

These kinds of attacks on democracy are happening across the country. Conservative lawmakers and activists have opened up a Pandora’s box of dirty tricks in every state where abortion is on or heading towards the ballot.

In Missouri, voters got text messages warning them against signing a pro-choice petition; they were told that petitioners were trying to steal their identity. South Dakota voters who signed a pro-choice petition got phone calls from anti-abortion activists pretending to be from the Secretary of State’s office, pressuring them to remove their names. The group behind that effort was formed by a Republican state legislator.

In Nebraska, hundreds of voters report being tricked into signing an anti-abortion ballot measure by people posing as pro-choice activists. Knowing how popular abortion rights are, conservatives there decided the best way to beat the state’s legitimate pro-choice ballot measure was to launch one of their own. Their amendment has a similar-sounding name, but instead of protecting abortion rights it would actually enshrine the state’s 12-week ban into the state constitution.

These efforts to stop voters from having a direct say on abortion rights weren’t one-offs or randomly generated actions: the ‘Decline to Sign’ campaigns that have popped up across the country are advised and funded by major national anti-abortion organizations, like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. What’s more, these groups aren’t just helping state activists—but legislators.

Before Ohio voters passed their abortion rights amendment Issue 1, for example, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose drafted a biased ballot summary that sounded more like anti-abortion propaganda than a voter guide. That’s because, it turned out, it was anti-abortion propaganda: LaRose admitted that he wrote the summary with the leaders of national anti-choice organizations.

Right now in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is paying out-of-state ‘experts’ from major anti-abortion groups to advise a panel tasked with publishing a financial impact statement for the state’s pro-choice ballot measure. This cost estimate, meant to inform voters how much restoring abortion rights might cost the state, is now being influenced by extremists from the Heritage Foundation and the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Unsurprisingly, they say making abortion legal will cost Florida millions of dollars. (Despite all evidence to the contrary.)

When tricking voters doesn’t work, anti-abortion activists are turning to intimidation. In Montana, pro-choice petitioners report being followed around and videotaped, a tactic meant to scare off anyone considering signing in support. A Florida anti-abortion group launched a website urging people to “report the precise locations” of pro-choice petitioners so that their activists could rush down to harass them. And in Arkansas, 79 signature-gatherers were just doxxed by an anti-abortion group who published their names and cities of residence. Since then, organizers say, the harassment and threats have escalated—with people telling petitioners, “I'’m going to find you and kill you.”

Remember, these are just the petitions to get abortion on the ballot; they’re not even campaigning for the amendments themselves yet.

While abortion rights supporters across the country are having their lives threatened, Republican politicians are insisting that they’ve ‘softened’ on abortion.

The GOP knows that they can’t stop every election or suppress every voter, and they certainly can’t change those pesky polls. So instead of taking post-Roe victory laps, Republican candidates are quietly removing language about their ‘pro-life’ bonafides from their campaign websites. And rather than standing firmly behind the policies they fought for decades to enact, the GOP is talking about exceptions, ‘compassion’, and—most infuriatingly—supporting “the will of the people.”

Republicans have used that phrase dozens of times over the last few months in a transparent attempt to paint unpopular abortion bans as something voters support. “The will of the people” has shown up everywhere from Donald Trump’s abortion talking points and interviews with anti-abortion leaders to Eagle Forum legal briefs. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds even dropped it last month when responding to the news that the state Supreme Court would allow a 6-week abortion ban to go into effect. Over 60% of Iowa voters want abortion to be legal.

The gross appropriation of democratic language is enraging, but it’s also a reminder: Conservatives know that what voters want matters. No matter how many different ways they try to quash our voices, no matter what they pull to stop us from having a say—they have to at least pretend to care, because they know the country cares. The GOP may be trying to kill democracy, but it gives me hope that they also can’t escape it.

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