Bad news: MO to vote on banning ranked voting

[in...@betterballotkc.org]

Friends --

The Missouri legislature has now voted to put a Missouri statewide constitutional amendment on the statewide ballot. We don't yet know if this will be for the August or for the November election. 

They haven't honorably put forward a simple amendment where people can decide yes or no. They start it out with a provision that non-citizens can't vote. That's already the law. This idea has been called "ballot candy" because it's expected to draw yes votes without voters paying attention to the rest of the bill. It's the exact same issue that led to a record-breaking filibuster of over 50 hours on another bill at a time when this banning bill had already passed the Senate (the House passed it last Friday). Here's reasoning reported in the Missouri Independent, May 17, 2024: 

Sen. Rick Brattin of Harrisonville, speaking for the Freedom Caucus at a news conference, defended the ballot candy provisions as giving voters a simpler question, easier to understand than . . . as a standalone: 

“You would have to have a lot of intensive funding to be able to get a message out, because (the initiative petition process) is a very convoluted, difficult thing to explain to voters,” Brattin said. “And we wanted to make sure we’re putting stuff in front of people that’s easy, that doesn’t require $60 million to try to get the message out.”

In other words, distracting the voters from what they're actually voting on is the point. 

But the Missouri constitution has single-subject rules, one for petitions and one for legislation. That is, there's a requirement that the proposal be only a single subject. It's designed especially to counter this kind of trickery. 

So our next step is to take this to court. The court could decide to sever the different subject that comes later, in which case, we have only the non-citizen non-voting provision, they've nixed the ban-ranking provision, and we're back to being able to focus on Kansas City. 

More likely, though, they could decide that the ban-ranking was the point (which it is) and sever the ballot candy. Or they could perhaps split the proposals up so they're two separate ballot measures. But any scenario that gets us just the ban-RCV without the ballot candy is crucial to defeat this ban. 

So for the August leafleting of voters at the polls:

* If this is on the August ballot, then obviously we need to leaflet people going in to impact their vote; with so many things on the ballot, they may not be aware of this and need some last-minute education. 

*If this is on the November ballot, we need to leaflet them coming out, to be able to get to voters before any campaign to vote for the ban does. 

-- Rachel MacNair

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