Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected an effort to make it significantly more difficult for citizens to amend the state constitution through the initiative petition process.
By the end of the night, Amendment 4 was overwhelmingly defeated at the ballot box, with the number of opposing votes nearly four times as great as those in favor.
State Rep. Ed Lewis, R-Moberly, seemed stunned by the wide margin of defeat.
“Was I surprised?” Lewis asked. “Yes. But looking at the amount of money that was put up against this, no I am not surprised.”
The ACLU of Missouri, which opposed Amendment 4, said in a statement that the measure was “an attempt to create a rigged system.”
“We the people should never give our power to politicians and the special interests who control them,” Luz María Henríquez, executive director for the ACLU of Missouri, said in the statement. “Amendment 4 is a stark warning to all Missourians that politicians would rather change the rules of our system and eliminate a century-old tradition because they cannot convince voters to choose their desired outcome.”
In Missouri, citizens have the ability to initiate constitutional amendments and pass them with a simple statewide majority. Amendments referred to voters by the Missouri General Assembly follow the same procedure.
Amendment 4 would have required future citizen-led initiatives to receive a statewide majority, as well as a majority vote in each of Missouri’s eight congressional districts.
Supporters of the amendment argued that the bar to amend the Missouri Constitution through the current initiative process was too low, and that a simple majority to enshrine permanent change was too easy.
Some supporters also argued that the change would prevent densely populated metropolitan areas from achieving statewide change on their own, thus giving rural districts more influence.
Opponents said the measure would allow voters in a single congressional district to block initiatives supported by a majority of Missourians, making the petition process more difficult to use. They also criticized the different standards, noting that citizen-initiated petitions would face many more requirements than legislatively referred amendments.
Because every district would have to approve an initiative under the proposal, opponents argued that any one of Missouri’s districts could effectively block an initiative, regardless of whether it had received a state majority.
Amendment 4 became one of the state’s most expensive ballot measure campaigns this year. Political committees on both sides raised millions of dollars, with opponents far outspending supporters through television advertising and statewide outreach efforts.
Because it was defeated at the ballot box Tuesday, the citizen-initiated amendment process will remain decided by a simple majority vote.
But Lewis, who also lost his District 18 seat in the Republican primary on Tuesday, insisted that the idea is not dead.
“Other legislators, not me, will continue working on this in the future,” he said.