This story was originally published on The 19th on June 14, 2024.
One woman said she was publicly called a killer, another said protesters chased her from place to place, and a third said she had stopped publicly posting her real-time location.
That’s the reality of collecting signatures to put abortion rights on the ballot in heavily Republican Arkansas, one of the most anti-abortion states in the country.
Signature-collection organizers and volunteers frequently face harassment and intimidation in the field. The risks of the work were highlighted in Arkansas this month when a conservative group posted online the names of about 80 people who were paid to collect signatures, which they had obtained through a public records request. Activists leading the petition described the incident as a form of “doxxing,” the malicious disclosure of personal information.
“The reactions have become more intense, ranging from just polite refusal to, ‘We’re going to find you and kill you,'” said Jenny Dias, communications director for Arkansans for Limited Government, a group leading the effort to add an abortion-rights ballot measure to the state this November. “It’s probably escalated over the last four to six weeks.”
Arkansas bans abortion in almost all cases and is one of 11 states where voters can directly voice their opinion on abortion in a general election. The group Arkansas for Limited Government has to gather more than 90,000 signatures by July 5 to get its measure, the “Arkansas Abortion Rights Initiative,” on the November ballot. The group believes it has a good chance of meeting the deadline.
clock: What to know as abortion rights battle moves to state ballots in 2024
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending federal abortion rights, no abortion ballot measure has been defeated, including in Republican-leaning states (though to a lesser extent in Arkansas).
Destiny Sinclair was one of several Arkansas canvassers whose names were made public last week by the Family Council, a conservative group that opposes the amendment. Sinclair said she didn’t fully understand what it meant until Limited Government Arkansas released a statement condemning the move. Then people started asking her how she was, worried.
“One of the first things I did was Google myself because I wanted to see what other people could find out about me,” she said. “It’s really mind-boggling. You can find out so much about a person on the internet.”
The Family Council did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Sinclair had already stopped disclosing her campaign location publicly, and in the days since her name and location were made public, she has made an effort to pair up with other campaign workers, something that was already a best-practice suggestion within the group but that now takes on even more significance for an increasingly wary Ms. Sinclair.
“I just look at someone and wonder if they know who I am,” she said.
The proposed bill would guarantee the right to abortion up to 18 weeks of pregnancy, and after that only in cases of rape, incest or if the pregnant woman’s life is endangered. According to a poll by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, just under half of Arkansans – 46 percent – believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 13 percent think it should be illegal in all cases.
In some Republican-leaning states, Republican officials have waged court battles to keep abortion-rights measures off the ballot and launched broader attacks on the citizen-led initiative process. Anti-abortion activists have also led grassroots efforts to block signatures on initiative petitions and, in some cases, activists say, have misinformed voters about the process or harassed initiative campaigners.
In South Dakota, anti-abortion groups impersonated state officials and made “scam” phone calls to voters who had signed petitions in support of abortion rights, asking them to retract their support, the Secretary of State’s office said.
In Montana, anti-abortion activists have photographed volunteers in public and disrupted campaign activities, but the coalition working to put abortion rights on the ballot has chosen to refrain from holding large public events or disclosing the location of its campaign offices, the Montana Free Press reported.
The release of the names of signature gatherers in Arkansas is a result of increasingly aggressive tactics by anti-abortion groups, said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), a resource and advocacy clearinghouse for progressive ballot measures.
“The purpose and intent is to intimidate people and discourage them from participating in the democratic process,” she said. “While this is disturbing, it should actually reinvigorate and invigorate people to continue participating.”
clock: Democrats plan to make abortion rights a priority in battleground states
The names of paid volunteers in Arkansas were obtained through a legitimate public records request, and their release is not illegal, but the coalition says it was intended to intimidate them. Information about unpaid volunteers has not been made public, but several volunteers say they have faced friction when acting in public. Laws regarding in-person canvassing vary by state, often putting canvassers in a legal gray area between free speech and harassment.
Debbie Tucker, an unpaid canvasser in her 60s, said she was outside a central Arkansas library last week with another canvasser in his 20s when a group of about a half-dozen protesters, both men and women, set up a table a few feet away. Tucker said one of the men was wearing a body camera and harassed everyone who approached the canvasser’s table.
Tucker wonders how many people wanted to sign the petition but didn’t because they feared for their safety.
“I felt angry, but I wasn’t scared,” Tucker said of the incident, “Maybe in a good way. It was good that it happened because now I’m angry, I’m more enraged, and I’m more likely to go out.”
Tucker eventually called her husband for help, and his presence quickly de-escalated the tension between her and the man wearing the body camera.
“It pisses me off,” Tucker said. “I hate to blame him, but these people, this guy, they’re just relentless. But when a man is there, they flinch. It’s sad, but we women know what it’s like.”
Sinclair echoed those sentiments and noted the vitriol directed at her and other female canvassers from men, most of whom are campaigning for voting measures in Arkansas.
“Protesters want to target women. … They want to target women when they’re alone,” she added. “They want us to feel scared. The most important thing for me is that it doesn’t scare me.”
Mary Rowe, 73, an unpaid canvasser based in northwest Arkansas, said she struggles with low awareness of ballot measures and finding public spaces to collect signatures in her conservative area. Harassment is an added challenge.
On two separate occasions, she said, a young man interrupted her setting up a table and collecting signatures at the University of Arkansas and refused to leave until campus security was called, and on a third occasion, another young man did the same thing.
“It kind of pisses me off that these kids aren’t being taught manners,” she said. “I’m their grandmother’s age. Why would they try to tell me what the world is like?”
In another instance, Ms. Rowe was collecting signatures downtown when an anti-abortion man began to treat her in a hostile manner. Ms. Rowe tried to defuse the situation by packing up her materials, calling it a day and leaving, but the man followed her to two restaurants.
clock: “The Collapse of Roe” focuses on those in the movement to end abortion and what happens next
Law didn’t want to get back in his car, but the man followed him for about 30 minutes, still talking to him, until he finally made it to City Hall, where he was able to hail a firefighter who gave him the phone number for the police department.
“I wasn’t scared, I was angry,” Rowe recalled, “but I don’t know these people… They’re acting out a kind of vigilante justice system, and I don’t think they like women.”
Jenny, an unpaid campaigner who asked that her last name not be used because she feared for her family’s safety, said she recently hid behind a trailer parked near a farm stand in the town square to lose sight of protesters. She even brings an umbrella to events to protect the faces of people signing petitions.
“I’ve been called a murderer. I’ve had men come up to me with children and say, ‘This woman likes to kill babies. Do you want to kill babies?’ And the look on these children’s faces is heartbreaking because they don’t understand what we’re doing,” she said.
While Rowe is a strong supporter of the ballot measure and citizen-led initiative, he looks forward to wrapping up the petition in the coming weeks.
“If you talk to most of our volunteers, this has probably taken up a large part of their mental capacity and waking hours over the last few months,” she said.
Arkansas Limited Government’s Diaz said the group has between 250 and 300 volunteers who will take turns collecting signatures for the petition over the next few weeks, some of whom are in a private group chat to check in in real time and share their experiences.
Ms Lo said working with other volunteers has been extremely rewarding, with many of them thanking her for her work and sharing their own experiences with abortions.
“The camaraderie is the best thing about this. When you get 120 signatures in an afternoon, it’s really elating,” she said. “It’s really elating.”
Tucker, who had been worried about confronting protesters for some time, said her experience at the library forced her to confront her fears.
“They took the fear out of me, so I think that was good,” she said.
