Florida’s proposed Amendment 4 would add the following language to the state constitution’s Declaration of Rights: “… no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider,” except for requiring parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion.

I have an opinion on that ballot measure. I won’t share that opinion with you.

The opinion I WILL share with you is that the measure should indeed be decided by the state’s voters. In fact, it’s already being decided by those voters. Mail ballots have already gone out. Some, including mine, have been returned and counted. “The system,” such as it is, is doing its job.

Governor Ron DeSantis hates that.

After losing a state Supreme Court bid to block the measure, DeSantis, his party, and their cronies in government have worked overtime to prevent voters from having their say.

On October 3, the Florida Department of Health threatened television stations with prosecution for running ads supporting the ballot measure.

On October 14, the Florida Office of Election Crimes and Security issued a report claiming that Floridians Protecting Freedom submitted a “large number of forged signatures or fraudulent petitions” to put the measure on the ballot.

Whether the report’s claims are true or not, the obvious reason for issuing it is to build a case so that DeSantis can seek to prevent the votes from being counted, or just flat-out overturn the will of the voters if the measure receives the 60% required for passage.

This isn’t about abortion. It’s about control.

As an anarchist, I can’t say I really trust “the voters” very much. If nothing else, it’s worth noting that these particular voters elected Ron DeSantis governor. Twice.

But I trust them at least a little more than I trust DeSantis (or Andrew Gillum or Charlie Crist if one of those two had defeated DeSantis).

DeSantis obviously doesn’t trust the voters very much, either. He’s pulling out all stops to prevent them from even having the opportunity to return a result he may not like.

DeSantis reminds me of a lawyer who doesn’t like the looks he’s getting from the jury during closing arguments. He expects the verdict to go against him, so he’s begging the judge for a mistrial to avoid that verdict.

Politicians never really trust voters, but most are less obvious about it than DeSantis.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In the past, I’ve written on (my friend and heroine) Caryn Ann Harlos’s challenge to Colorado’s law commanding that “[no] election official, watcher, or person shall reveal to any other person the name of any candidate for whom a voter has voted or communicate to another his opinion, belief, or impression as to how or for whom a voter has voted.”

Now (my friend and heroine) Susan Hogarth is similarly challenging North Carolina’s law mandating that “[n]o person shall photograph, videotape, or otherwise record the image of a voted official ballot for any purpose not otherwise permitted under law.”

In solidarity with those two courageous free speech activists, here’s me with my 2024 general election ballot (I voted early by mail this year as soon as I received my ballot):

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I guess this column is a lot longer than my usual 500.

“Any elector, according to Florida Statutes, Title IX, 104.20, “who, except as provided by law, allows his or her ballot to be seen by any person … is guilty of a misdemeanor of the first degree.”

In the US, speech is protected by the First Amendment. The government doesn’t get to tell you what to say or how to say it.

Except, many state governments insist, when it comes to ballot selfies.

They say they want you to vote.

They set up mechanisms facilitating your ability to vote.

But then they turn around and say you’re a criminal if you show others how you voted.

Those state governments are wrong. They should be challenged, and their evil and unconstitutional rules banning speech should be mocked, challenged, or at the very least ignored.

“Su voto es su voz!” Willie Velasquez told Hispanic Americans as he and the organization he founded encouraged and helped millions of them to register and vote: “Your vote is your voice!”

He was right as far as he went. Whatever else voting might be, and whether or not your vote has a significant effect on an election’s outcome (it usually doesn’t), voting is speech — your expression of your preferences in elections.

If you want to keep your vote secret, fine. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to speak, to not speak, or to speak only to some (vote counters, for example) and not to others (the general public, for example).

But that’s your decision to make, not the government’s.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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As a free speech fundamentalist, I’m not seeing much of value on offer from either Democrats or Republicans in this year’s presidential election. While I’m not especially surprised, I am somewhat unsettled by just how open both campaigns are about their desire to suppress speech that reflects negatively on either their ideas or on their candidates as people, sometimes while cosplaying as “free speech” supporters.

I’m not unsettled because I want to shout “fire” in a crowded theater (unless there IS a fire), or use racial slurs, or convince you that bad actors with space lasers are controlling the weather, or whatever.

Nor is it that I want to hear other people doing those particular things, although I do — because it tells me who those people are and that I shouldn’t trust them with anything, especially political power.

It’s because I’ve read George Orwell’s most popular work, 1984.

“The purpose of Newspeak,” Orwell wrote in that novel’s appendix, “was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the single party ruling his fictional country of Oceania], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that …  a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”

Attempts to control language are attempts to control your mind, and censorship is the oldest tool of that trade.

It’s all good and well to inveigh against “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “hate speech.” But usually when a politician does so, he or she has plans to censor particular words, thoughts, and ideas, either cynically in a raw grab for power or naively in the false belief that Bad Thoughts can be banished by force of law.

I call that belief false because history says it’s never ENTIRELY successful. Even the world’s most totalitarian regimes have always failed to keep their subjects’ minds in a state of continuing pristine belief, mentally (or even vocally) toeing the regime’s line on every subject. But even partial success in such a project costs innocent people their freedoms and their lives.

Forbidding you to say X is an attempt to keep me from hearing X, and  to stop both of us from thinking, or acting on, X. Even if X is untrue, that’s a conclusion we’re entitled to reach for ourselves on the basis of open expression and debate. Reaching it for us forcibly and without the ability to appeal isn’t a job we should ever entrust to government.

A little bit of censorship, even for the “best” reasons, is like being a little bit pregnant — there’s no such thing. We’re free to speak our minds, or we aren’t. Any supposed “in between” spot depends entirely on whether those in power agree with what we think … and that’s not freedom.

If a politician wants to tell you what you may or may not say, that politician isn’t your friend.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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