voting

Candidates are filing to represent Kansas City with a run for Missouri's 4th, 5th and 6th districts under a redrawn congressional map. Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas won't be among them.

Voters in Kansas City, Missouri, will soon decide whether to renew the city's earnings tax on wages, salaries and profits. If the measure fails, Missouri law forbids the tax from being revived, so Kansas City will need to find another source for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Kansas City has relied on the 1% earnings tax to pay for much of its budget since it was enacted in 1963. As voters begin to head to the polls, local leaders want them to renew it again.

The U.S. Department of Justice claimed in court it already has sensitive data on voters so it can check for people who should not be registered. However, the Kansas secretary of state said none of that information has been shared.

The 1% earnings tax provides nearly half of Kansas City’s overall budget. Voters will decide April 7 whether to extend it for another five years.

Rep. Melanie Stinnett, a Springfield Republican, sponsored the bipartisan bill that could give voting rights back to more than 53,000 Missourians. It passed the Missouri House 107-36, and is now waiting for action in the Senate.

The state House has approved legislation that would allow more than 53,000 people supervised by the state to vote.

Passed by Republican lawmakers last year, Amendment 4 would require a majority of voters in every Missouri congressional district to approve a proposed constitutional amendment for it to pass. That would allow a small minority of voters to defeat petition campaigns.

Rep. Pat Proctor, a Leavenworth Republican who is running for secretary of state, and Rep. Paul Waggoner, a Hutchinson Republican, also want to require driver’s licenses to indicate citizenship status, in an effort to stamp out the already-rare instances of noncitizen voting.

Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, going against a century of precedent, declared that the Republican-favoring congressional map took effect Dec. 11, even though opponents had submitted enough signatures to likely force a statewide referendum.

Some Republican election officials have broken with the president on nationalizing elections, even as they have avoided criticizing him directly. That includes Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who also told lawmakers he wouldn’t provide the state’s full voter list to the feds without a court order.

Kansas lawmakers say that requiring driver's licenses to list legal status would reduce noncitizen voting — something that is exceedingly rare. One study says suspected cases happen just 0.0001% of the time.