The Florida Supreme Court agreed to fast-track a case to determine if Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state officials improperly used their power to interfere against an abortion-access amendment on the November statewide ballot.
DeSantis, Attorney General Ashley Moody and Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) Secretary Jason Weida have until Sept. 23 to respond to a complaint from a Palm Beach County attorney alleging that a website created by the agency last week about Amendment 4 violated state law, the Miami Herald reports.
"[DeSantis, Moody and Weida have] waged a campaign to interfere with the election," attorney Adam Richardson said in the complaint. He asked justices "to forbid them from misusing or abusing their offices and agencies to interfere with the election for Amendment 4."
Richardson, a frequent critic of the DeSantis administration filed the complaint on Tuesday, which seeks for the court to order state officials to show what authority they have for performing a specific action.
The request comes after the governor announced earlier this month that his administration will be examining thousands of the amendment's petition signatures, looking for fraud.
DeSantis' deputy secretary of state has asked supervisors in Hillsborough, Orange, Palm Beach and Osceola counties to gather roughly 36,000 signatures for the state to review despite a state law deadline to challenge the validity of the signatures having passed.
The thousands of signatures asked to be verified are part of the nearly 1 million collected by Floridians Protecting Freedom— the initiative's organizer— and previously verified by local supervisors as belonging to real Floridians. The new request by the DeSantis administration is only asking for signatures that were already deemed valid, a move that struck some supervisors as odd, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
"I have never in my tenure had a request like this one," said Osceola County Supervisor of Elections Mary Jane Arrington, a Democrat who has been in the job for 16 years.
The health agency also launched a website last week, claiming that Amendment 4 "threatens women's safety," including information about groups that donated to the Amendment 4 campaign effort.
Supporters of the amendment criticized the site and speculated it may violate a Florida law that prohibits state employees and officers from using their "official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with an election."
Richardson's lawsuit is the most significant legal pushback so far to DeSantis' efforts to defeat Amendment 4, which seeks to overturn the state's six-week abortion ban and enshrine reproductive rights into the state constitution.
The Court's decision to expedite the case also comes as the ACLU of Florida, a coalition member of the pro-Amendment 4 campaign, said it plans to sue the state in the coming days on behalf of Floridians Protecting Freedom.
The lawsuit will challenge the health care agency's "misuse of taxpayer dollars," Michelle Morton, an attorney with the ACLU of Florida, said on Wednesday.
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