feature image photo by OCTAVIO JONES / Contributor via Getty Images

Last night, Floridians voted on Amendment 4, which would have enshrined abortion access in the state’s constitution. The ballot proposal would have allowed abortions up to around 24 weeks of pregnancy rather than the current dangerous ban which prohibits abortions after just six weeks. After months of “yes on 4” organizing, the amendment “won” 57.06% of the vote but still will not pass. Why? Because of a shit ass amendment passed in 2006 that requires a 60% voter approval rate for any amendments to Florida’s constitution.

The 60% rule — which itself did not meet its own asinine requirements and actually only passed by 57.78% in 2006 — makes it incredibly hard to amend the Florida constitution and created a challenging threshold for the fight for abortion rights in the state. A majority win (and solid majority at that!) did not matter in the end.

And this is bad not only for people in Florida but for people outside of it, too. The six-week ban has had devastating effects that radiate beyond the state, as Florida was long a rare refuge in the deep South for people seeking abortions. The Supreme Court of Florida ruled its previous abortion ban unconstitutional in 1972 — a full year before Roe v. Wade passed. Abortion remained constitutionally protected in Florida until Ron DeSantis started ruining everything down here, including signing a bill banning most abortions after 15 weeks in April 2022. Then, in May 2024, DeSantis signed into law an even more restrictive measure that effectively bans all abortions in the state after six weeks. Because the majority-approved Amendment 4 from last night does not meet the 60% threshold, that six-week ban remains the law of the land.

Already last night, I started seeing on social media the same language about Florida that emerges every election cycle that characterizes the state as the “problem” with this country, as an outlier. This completely ignores so much history and context, including that Florida’s elections have been heavily impacted by the fact that DeSantis basically turned this state into a playground for the wealthy and conservative during the beginning of the pandemic. Actually, you know what, my friend and Florida brother Stef Rubino said it best last night, so let me just quote them. In response to someone tweeting out that stupid gif of Bugs Bunny sawing off the state, they wrote: “Y’all are doing this shit again as if this state hasn’t become the trash receptacle for YOUR state’s unwanted fascistic LOSER, scumbag, bottom-feeders because the fascist governor told them to come here to be ‘free’??? I swear to god, y’all will do anything except tell the truth.”

Elsewhere in the country, abortion rights measures failed in Nebraska and South Dakota where existing bans will remain. But seven states voted in favor of abortion access, including a critical win in Missouri, where voters successfully undid the state’s abortion ban which prohibited all abortion access with no exceptions for rape or incest. Per the new amendment passed last night, abortion will be legalized up to the point of fetal viability (that 24ish weeks point, which the Florida amendment also sought to enshrine). So that’s a major reversal of previously what was one of the first and most restrictive state abortion bans passed after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Measures to protect abortion also passed in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, and Montana. Nebraska had a dueling pair of measures on the ballot: Voters supported a measure that keeps a 12-week abortion ban in place, and a competing measure that would expand access to viability was struck down. It would have had to not just win a majority vote to pass but receive more “for” votes than the competing measure. In Nevada, steps were taken toward constitutionally protecting abortion access with a successful ballot measure that would enshrine abortion access up to fetal viability in the state…but they will have to vote in favor of it again in 2026 for it to actually pass.

In Nebraska, Nevada, and Florida, we see how legislative loopholes make it even harder to undo bans and constitutionally protect abortion access. Allow me to take this one step further. You can point to any of the bad outcomes of last night — and there are many beyond the big obvious one — and find underlying policies and systems that bolstered those outcomes. From Florida’s 60% rule to rampant voter suppression in Georgia and elsewhere to the electoral fucking college, so much of this supposedly democratic process is rigged and designed to serve those already in power. These systems do not serve queer and trans people, poor and working class people, Black and Indigenous people, immigrants, people who can get pregnant, anyone at the margins of hegemonic society. They do not serve you. The ruling class has gotten better and better at creating and bolstering systems and loopholes and labyrinths of legislation that make it harder and harder to fight anything, to change anything. I’m hoping the Amendment 4 outcome in Florida leads to a concerted effort to remove the 60% rule, which will of course need a 60% approval rate itself. The whole system needs to be dismantled.

The 60% rule might sound like small potatoes compared to the larger fight; if you’re outside of the state, perhaps you think it doesn’t impact you. But if the 60% rule is what ultimately let the pro-life losers win despite not having the support of the majority of voters in the state, then what’s to stop other states from creating similar loopholes? Right now, 38 states require only a simple majority vote on amendments, while 11 states require a supermajority vote or other threshold beyond a straightforward majority. The 60% rule in Florida is just one example of how broken the system is, but sometimes we have to look at these zoomed-in contexts in order to better understand and organized against the more macro issues. And no matter where you live, abortion bans in one state have calamitous effects for entire regions.

The majority of Florida voters wanted to protect the right to abortion and end the six-week ban — which also harms people with pregnancy complications who need to terminate pregnancies for a whole slew of medical reasons — but now Floridians are trapped. To the north, there are six-week bans in Georgia and South Carolina and a 12-week ban in North Carolina. Above the panhandle and moving west are some of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, including Alabama which bans abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. One look at a map of abortion access by state shows just how dangerous it is to get pregnant in a huge portion of the country. If the 60% rule didn’t exist, Florida could have become a refuge in this region like it had been historically before 2022. But one rule from 2006 just solidified how locked down this entire region is in terms of access to safe, legal abortions.

If you have the means to give $$$ directly to the communities most impacted by this news, consider giving to the Florida Access Network, which is a queer statewide abortion funding organization, giving to multiple Florida abortion funds at once, or giving to S.W.A.N. of Central Florida, which  provides clinic escorts every single day in central Florida and is doing so much vital organizing work in this part of the state.

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