Missouri Senate advances GOP plan to weaken direct democracy after removing ‘ballot candy’

The Republican-controlled Missouri Senate on Tuesday advanced a plan to make changing the state constitution more difficult — in part by weakening the power of urban residents’ votes — after Democrats spent days blocking a vote on the measure.

The legislation, from Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, an Arnold Republican running for Congress, would overhaul Missouri’s century-old initiative petition process that allows voters to place constitutional amendments on the ballot by gathering signatures. It comes as abortion rights supporters seek to place an amendment on the ballot later this year.

Coleman’s plan advanced on a voice vote and needs one more vote before it heads to the House. Voters would have final say over the measure. House Republicans on Monday also advanced a separate proposal that would effectively lengthen the time it takes to get a constitutional amendment approved on the ballot.

Coleman’s legislation — which is itself a constitutional amendment — would require amendments to the state constitution be approved essentially twice, a majority vote in at least five of the state’s eight congressional districts and a majority vote statewide. Currently, constitutional amendments only need a majority vote statewide.

The change would give rural residents more power in statewide votes on constitutional amendments. A coalition of rural congressional districts would have effective veto control over amendments, no matter how popular a measure might be in Kansas City or St. Louis.

“It’s just a fundamentally unfair and undemocratic premise that one voter would have more power than another voter in different parts of the state,” said Sen. Lauren Arthur, a Kansas City Democrat.

Senate Democrats and voting rights advocates have criticized the legislation as an attack on democracy and Democrats spent three days blocking a vote on the plan, including holding the floor overnight Monday into Tuesday. Democrats ultimately agreed to relinquish the floor after Senate Republicans stripped deceptive provisions in the bill that were intended to entice voters.

An initial version of the measure would have also asked voters to ban foreign interference in ballot measures and allow only U.S. citizens to vote on constitutional amendments, two situations that are already illegal under federal law.

Democrats, and even Coleman, the bill sponsor, have referred to the extra provisions as “ballot candy,” a phrase in politics that refers to inserting unrelated but popular ideas into a measure to encourage people to vote in favor of it. Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, an Independence Democrat, had signaled that Democrats were willing to end the filibuster if the extra questions were removed.

“We just want a fair fight,” Rizzo said on the floor on Tuesday.

Chuck Hatfield, a Jefferson City-based attorney who has been involved in a slew of initiative petition campaigns, said in an interview that Coleman’s proposal included some of the most extreme forms of ballot candy he’s seen.

“They’re not really making a change. It’s not really candy,” he said. “It’s meaningless language. But it presents it in a way that may trick voters into voting yes on the measure.”

After Democrats spent hours blocking the vote, Sen. Mike Cierpiot, a Lee’s Summit Republican, offered an amendment that removed the extra provisions. The decision to end the filibuster signaled that Democrats believe voters would reject the measure on its merits if the extraneous questions were removed.

Several GOP-led states, including Ohio and South Dakota, have pushed to raise the threshold for citizen-led petitions in recent years. Voters in both states struck down those measures at the ballot box.

Coleman last week touted her legislation, saying that the state constitution “should not be able to be changed just with a simple majority of vote.”

“It should have to have a majority of congressional districts as well,” she said.

But Coleman also acknowledged that the previous version of the legislation included language intended to lure voters, saying there was “absolutely ballot candy” in the proposal.

There’s a difference, Hatfield said, between “meaningful candy” and “meaningless candy.” One example of meaningful candy was the 2018 Clean Missouri constitutional amendment that overhauled how legislative districts are drawn but also included limits on lobbyist gifts to politicians, a popular concept for voters.

Coleman’s initiative petition proposal, on the other hand, could have run into legal trouble. Hatfield said that Missouri courts in the past have struck down or rewritten misleading ballot titles.

“The courts have said, when it comes to the ballot title, that language that the voters are going to see, it is unfair to say in the ballot title that you’re changing a law you are not changing,” he said.

The political discussion surrounding the deceptive language, Hatfield said, was that Democrats were willing to let voters decide whether to increase the threshold for constitutional amendments so long as the question was fair.

“There is a perception that the ballot candy is unfair, and the voters may not want to eat those green beans once you take away the Tootsie Roll,” Hatfield said.