GOP renews push to make it harder to amend Missouri constitution by initiative petition

Republican lawmakers’ latest attempt to change Missouri’s century-old initiative petition process was met with widespread opposition Tuesday. 

Hanging over the proceedings, though hardly discussed on Tuesday, were a pair of initiative petition campaigns seeking to put an amendment on the statewide ballot rolling back Missouri near-total ban on abortion. 

One of the campaigns has already reported raising $2 million to bankroll its efforts, amplifying the sense of GOP urgency to get changes to the process done before any abortion amendment goes to voters. 

State Rep. Ed Lewis of Moberly put forth two bills looking to require any amendments to the state constitution receive a majority of votes statewide and in a majority of the state’s congressional districts.

Currently, a constitutional amendment placed on the ballot through the initiative petition process only requires 51% to pass. 

“To change the constitution of the state of Missouri, there should be broad support statewide, and I would submit broad geographic support,” Lewis told his colleagues during a hearing in the house’s elections and elected officials committee.

State Rep. Mike Haffner, a Republican from Pleasant Hill, re-filed legislation he put forward last year that would invalidate signatures on a petition if the ballot language changes. 

Missouri’s ballot initiative process – which gives citizens a pathway to amending the state constitution – is already grueling, those familiar with the process testified Tuesday.

Missouri law requires petitioners hoping to amend the state constitution to collect more than 171,000 signatures from registered voters in six of Missouri’s eight congressional districts by May. The path to successfully landing an initiative on the ballot usually costs millions of dollars and months of litigation

Sam Licklider, a lobbyist with Missouri Realtors, opposed all three pieces of legislation. His organization has vowed to spend big to defeat any initiative petition changes Republicans place on the 2024 ballot.

“It is horribly expensive and complicated as the dickens to pass an initiative petition.” said Licklider, whose organization pursued successful ballot campaigns in 2010 and 2018.

He said hiring signature collectors, who often come from out of state, is difficult because the job is often underpaid and “a miserable existence.” 

Plus, Licklider added, most attempts to make initiative petition processes more difficult in other states have failed. In 2023, voters in Ohio rejected a GOP push to make the initiative petition process harder by 13 percentage points.

Residency requirements, more power to state officials

Haffner wants to keep non-Missourians out of the signature gathering process. His bill would add a residency requirement for those paid to be signature gatherers, meaning only Missouri residents, or those who have lived in the state for at least 30 days, could participate. 

“This would ensure Missourians are in control of our Missouri constitution,” Haffner said. “Not out of state interests. Not out of state money.”

Most successful campaigns are so costly because they require campaigns to hire signature-gathering firms, which can employ people from anywhere in the country. 

Denise Lieberman, director and general counsel for the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition, said the residency requirement was unconstitutional.

“We believe it imposes unnecessary, and in many cases, superfluous regulations of initiative petitions that are simply intended to draw out the process and make it harder,” she said.

Haffner also included a provision which would prevent signature gatherers from being paid on a signature-by-signature basis, as he argued this could incentivize fraud. 

Deputy Secretary of State Trish Vincent spoke in support of the bill, which she said her office helped draft and which she said would create efficiencies for the secretary of state. She also testified to the office’s careful process of validating signatures to prevent fraud.

She said in the current legislative cycle, 173 initiative petitions were filed, and her office approved all but nine for circulation. 

John Schmidt, with the American Civil Liberties Union, testified that the bill would expand the powers of Missouri’s secretary of state and attorney general by allowing them to review ballot initiatives for “sufficiency” and reject them.

“This bill would allow the attorney general to review petitions for their content,” Schmidt said. “What this means is it would install partisan politicians as essential gatekeepers to the initiative process.”

If the legislation passed, it would mean if a ballot title was changed in court after any signatures were collected, it would “severely hinder” the already costly signature collecting process and potentially kill the petition by rendering all initial signatures invalid, Schmidt said.

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft was blamed for a delay in getting an initiative petition looking to restore abortion rights to the point of fetal viability off the ground. 

In November, Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, backed by the Missouri ACLU, won a legal battle over the ballot summary language, giving the coalition the green light to move ahead with signature gathering months after they filed their initiative petitions.

Getting approval from more congressional districts

Lewis listed off to lawmakers recent ballot initiatives that he said were controversial in rural areas, including Medicaid expansion and recreational marijuana legalization.

He said his bills would give more voice to rural voters who didn’t approve of prior ballot measures. 

His legislation also includes what State Rep. Donna Baringer, a Democrat from St. Louis, called “ballot candy.” This includes language preventing sales taxes on food and foreign government influence on initiative petitions.

“Really what we’re trying to do is make it harder to pass initiative petitions,” said State Rep. David Tyson Smith, a Democrat from Columbia, adding that if Lewis really wants to prevent foreign ownership of Missouri land, he should write a separate bill.

But State Rep. Brad Banderman, a Republican from St. Clair, disagreed, saying broadening where signatures are collected made sense. 

“Getting a simple majority of those congressional districts I think is a fair approach to making sure that when we do something as sacred as our state constitution, something that’s very difficult for us to go back and amend,” he said. “That we do it in a way that the case has to be made across the entire state.”

Despite there being two attempts to get initiative on the statewide ballot to restore some abortion rights in Missouri, the issue was hardly discussed Tuesday.

Both Susan Kline, with Missouri Right to Life, and Samuel Lee, with Campaign for Life, testified in favor of Lewis’ legislation.

Lee said the bills would avoid “a tyranny of the majority,” but made no reference to the ongoing abortion rights campaigns.

Last week, senators spent two hours debating whether to invoke a little-used rule that would have the Senate act as a “Committee of the Whole” to debate legislation making it harder to pass a constitutional amendment by initiative petition. The effort failed.