Cole County Circuit Judge Daniel Green ordered the first three bullet points of the summary voters will see on the ballot to be removed, saying they were misleading because they tout provisions already in state law — such as a ban on foreign campaign contributions and penalties for signature fraud.
It isn’t until the fourth bullet point that voters learn the proposal’s main purpose, which is to require constitutional amendments put on the ballot by voters to obtain both a simple majority statewide and a majority in all eight congressional districts to pass. Currently, constitutional amendments only require a simple majority statewide.
Scott Charton, spokesman for Missourians for Fair Governance, the political arm of the organization that filed the lawsuit, the Missouri Association of Realtors, called the quick decision by Green to remove misleading “ballot candy” a total victory.
“We are grateful the court agreed with our arguments and is stripping the misleading, unfair and prejudicial ballot candy from this bad measure,” Charton said. “Missourians deserve clarity in what they are voting on, especially when they are being asked by lawmakers to give up their citizen initiative power, a constitutional right they reserved for themselves more than a century ago.”
Passed by lawmakers during a special session last fall convened to enact a gerrymandered congressional map, the proposed amendment would allow a small percentage of the state’s voters to defeat any citizen initiative petition.
During the 2024 general election, 311,915 votes were cast in the 1st District out of the state’s 2,960,266 votes. So 156,000 voters — or about 5.3% of the statewide vote — could prevent a measure from passing.
Only citizen-led initiative petitions would be affected. Amendments placed on the ballot by state lawmakers are not included in the change.
Missouri is one of 24 states that allows citizen initiative petitions. They can be used to either amend the constitution or change state law, though the path to successfully doing so is often arduous and expensive, requiring tens of thousands of signatures to even land on the ballot.
Through recent ballot measures, Missourians have legalized abortion and recreational use of marijuana and voted to increase the minimum wage and mandate paid-sick leave.
In 2024, the abortion-rights amendment passed with just shy of 52% of the vote with large support from the state’s urban, more-populated areas. Voters in all but eight of Missouri’s 115 counties opposed the amendment.
