GOP senator urges Missouri House to reinstate ‘ballot candy’ into initiative petition bill

When Terrence Wise explains Missouri’s initiative petition process to his children, he brings up one particularly remarkable play by the Kansas City Chiefs.

The famous 13 second overtime win against the Buffalo Bills secured the Chiefs a place in the 2023 Super Bowl. As a result of the win, the NFL changed its overtime rules.

“That worked in our favor here in this Super Bowl this year, but that shouldn’t be the game we play when we talk about our democratic process,” Wise says he told his children, and then on Tuesday, Missouri lawmakers. “It should be majority rule and it should be fair and the winner should be the winner.”

Wise, with Stand Up KC, a group of low-wage workers who advocate for better pay and conditions in the Kansas City area, was among those who testified against a bill filed by state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, a Republican from Arnold, seeking to change Missouri’s citizen-led initiative petition process by making it more difficult to pass constitutional amendments.

The bill went before the House Committee on Elections and Elected Officials on Tuesday, one of the first pieces of Senate legislation to go before the House.

The legislation would require a statewide majority and majority vote in five of the state’s eight congressional districts to pass a constitutional amendment through the initiative petition process or a state convention. Right now, constitutional amendments just need a simple majority of 50% of the votes plus one.

The bill – Senate Joint Resolution 74 – remains a top priority for Missouri Republicans. 

While similar legislation has been introduced several times over the past few years, there’s renewed urgency this session as an initiative petition campaign seeking to legalize abortion up to the point of fetal viability continues to garner strong donor support.

In Missouri, all abortions are illegal except in the case of medical emergencies.

Coleman’s bill passed out of the Senate last month after Democrats filibustered for 21 hours, eventually scoring a win after Republicans agreed to remove so-called “ballot candy.” 

In addition to making it harder to enact constitutional amendments, the ballot candy would have asked voters if they want to bar non-citizens from voting and ban foreign entities from contributing to or sponsoring constitutional amendments. 

Democratic senators called the immigration and foreign entities provisions misleading and a sleight of hand meant to confuse voters from the issue at the heart of the amendment.  

Testifying Tuesday, Coleman asked representatives to return the ballot candy to the bill before passing it and sending it to the Senate for a final vote.

While lobbyists with Missouri Right to Life and Campaign for Life continue to testify in support of the bill, Coleman maintained the possibility of abortion landing on the November ballot isn’t her main motivator.

“People should have a voice, they should have a say. And that voice and that say should primarily be through their representative government whom they have a chance to throw out on our ears every two or four years,” Coleman said. “And they should have the ability to directly take something to the ballot, but we want to encourage people to make statutory changes and not constitutional changes.”

Asked if she’s confident the bill, if amended in the House, will pass once it’s back in the Senate, Coleman referred to a process called “previous question.”

Used to kill a filibuster, invoking the rarely-used rule allows the Senate to shut down debate and force a vote on legislation. 

Coleman on Tuesday said that while she and her Republican Senate colleagues opted out of using the rule to end a Senate filibuster last month, it remains in their back pocket when it comes time for a final vote.

As the Senate convened on Wednesday, Minority Leader John Rizzo of Independence and his fellow Democrats shut down any votes for the day, making a decision to filibuster after he learned Coleman threatened to invoke the previous question rule once back in the Senate.

“I have been through the movement of a previous question. It is mass chaos in here,” Rizzo said. “There are hard feelings that happen. People scream and yell at each other to the point where you are worried that people might come to blows.”

Rizzo said he hoped Wednesday’s filibuster would be an isolated event before returning to business as usual Thursday ahead of the legislature’s spring break. The Senate adjourned for the day after nearly two hours.

“Maybe we should’ve had course corrections before this,”Rizzo said Wednesday. “But the bottom line is we can do it today. We can do it now.”

State Rep. Tyson Smith, a Democrat from Columbia, on Tuesday called the bill an attempt to sabotage the initiative petition process and undermine majority rule.

In the past two election cycles, two ballot measures stemming from initiative petitions – Medicaid expansion and recreational marijuana legalization – have passed despite opposition from the GOP majority in the statehouse. Meanwhile, hundreds of other initiative petition campaigns failed to land on the ballot in the first place. 

Initiative petition campaigns are costly, in large part because of how many signatures are required to guarantee the measure makes it to the ballot. Groups are increasingly going through the process to amend the constitution in recent years because they are harder to overturn because a second statewide vote is required to undo any measure that passes.

Coleman and other lawmakers in support of the bill have maintained that changing the initiative petition process would give more voice to rural voters.

Republicans lawmakers have also argued that too many recent initiative petitions have been funded by out-of-state interest groups.

“It seems primarily to be a question of fundraising capability of those who are attempting to push it rather than the quality of the idea put forward when it comes to the initiative petition process,” Coleman said, pushing back on opinions that the initiative petition process is already difficult enough.

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An analysis by The Independent found that by including the concurrent majority standard, as few as 23% of voters could defeat a ballot measure. This analysis looked at the majority in the four districts with the fewest number of voters in 2020 and 2022.

“It feels like we’re trying to fix something that ain’t broke,” said Amy Kuo Hammerman, with National Council of Jewish Women St. Louis, testifying in opposition.

Denise Lieberman, director of the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition, said the citizen initiative petition process is “the purest form of democratic participation.”

“When citizens are allowed to participate under the same ground rules as you all have, it advances our democracy, it encourages citizens to engage in conversations with one another, to talk and debate, to be participants,” she said. “And democracy functions better when that happens.” 

This story was updated at 2:50 p.m. Wednesday to include Senate Democrats’ response to Coleman’s statements during the House committee hearing.