Just how badly would Missouri’s Amendment 4 have failed if Gov. Mike Kehoe had left the initiative on the ballot for November instead of moving it to August? That’s about the only question left after a mammoth beatdown of a measure designed to minimize the power of the voters in this deep-red state.
Amendment 4 emerged from Republicans’ anger at the temerity of their citizens to display independent streaks rather than down-the-line conservatism. Beginning in 2020, voters unleashed a successful series of ballot initiatives legalizing abortion, approving recreational cannabis, expanding Medicaid, raising the minimum wage, and enabling sports betting. Voters also approved a paid sick leave mandate: one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked.
Lawmakers managed to dispense with the last one: Since the measure was a state statute and not a constitutional amendment, legislators passed a law to repeal it. But the rest of these rapid-fire victories added up to a massive assault on ultraconservative orthodoxies in the Show-Me State.
Bent on invalidating voters’ prerogatives, the legislature introduced Amendment 4 to change the voting process for ballot measures. Instead of a statewide majority, statewide constitutional amendments would have to secure a majority vote in each of the state’s eight congressional districts. Voters recognized that one district could block the rest of the state. Or, as one Facebook poster explained it, “If 4 people want ice cream and the 5th person doesn’t, then nobody gets ice cream.”
But Republicans also opened a back door to Amendment 4—for themselves. Constitutional amendments proposed by state legislators would still only need a statewide majority vote. One of the flimsier premises behind this line of thinking was that since voters chose their elected representatives, they’d already participated in the initiative process, another sterling example of “fine for thee but not for me” reasoning.
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Gov. Kehoe regularly claimed that Amendment 4 would help prevent outside money from surging into the state, as it did to support the abortion and recreational marijuana questions. Amendment 4 supporters also argued that the initiative would protect small towns and villages against the designs of cities, namely St. Louis and Kansas City. Ultimately, switching from a high-turnout general electorate to what state leaders thought would be a midsummer low-turnout primary would enable Amendment 4 to sail through.
The response from Missouri voters was basically show-me something that won’t happen. Amendment 4 imploded up, down, and across urban and rural Missouri, 80 percent to 20 percent. The amendment’s strongest showing was in rural Shelby County, where only 41 percent of voters supported it. The revolt carried over to Amendment 5, a proposal to ditch the state income tax. It also failed spectacularly, 83 percent to 17 percent.
“Voters like having access to the ballot. They especially like when the Republican-led legislature isn’t listening to them,” House Minority Leader Ashley Aune (D-Kansas City) told St. Louis Public Radio. “It’s why we had to legalize marijuana on the ballot. It’s why we had to enshrine abortion rights in our constitution on the ballot. It’s why we had to expand Medicaid on the ballot. These are all things that voters were asking their Republican-led legislature to make progress on, and they weren’t doing it.”
Missouri’s Republican lawmakers are nothing if not persistent and won’t be deterred by the 80-20 drubbing. They are likely to pivot to other mechanisms, such as a supermajority requirement for passage. (South Dakota has this very proposition going before voters in November.) They could also take up stricter requirements on signature gathering; a bill crafted to do just that failed to advance in the legislature.
In the meantime, they’ve moved into the next high-profile fight to preserve another cherished objective: thwarting a ballot initiative that would put the state’s new mid-decade congressional maps to a vote.
Last September, Missouri Republicans caved to President Trump’s demands and passed a controversial mid-decade redistricting plan designed to turn one of Missouri’s two Democratic congressional districts Republican, which would give the GOP a 7-to-1 advantage. Those maps have already been used in this year’s primary elections. (Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, the Democrat whose Kansas City base was eliminated in the gerrymander, is still running for re-election but in a reconfigured Fifth Congressional District, where Trump would have won 58 percent to 40 percent had the 2026 map been in effect in 2024.)
This week, the Missouri courts will decide which maps ultimately prevail. Shortly after the legislature created the new maps, People Not Politicians Missouri, a statewide democracy advocacy group, launched a referendum to put the new maps to a vote. The campaign submitted 305,968 signatures last December, more than enough to reach the ballot. But Secretary of State Denny Hoskins waited until the eleventh hour, which was coincidentally the same day as the August 4 primary, to declare that the referendum was unconstitutional and that the signatures would not be counted. His reasoning: The Missouri Constitution is silent on requiring a referendum in conjunction with redistricting.
People Not Politicians promptly filed suit, arguing that the state must allow voters to decide whether the new maps should be used or not.
Hoskins also must navigate a second lawsuit brought by Respect MO Voters, a grassroots group focused on preserving the citizen initiative process, over another constitutional amendment proposal which enshrines initiative and referendum processes as fundamental rights based on current procedural frameworks. Under that amendment, state lawmakers could not change or reject measures approved by those processes unless they obtained the agreement of 80 percent of state lawmakers in each chamber. Voters would also be required to approve those changes.
Hoskins had rejected that proposed amendment outright.
A decision on the redistricting referendum that sends the measure to the November ballot would throw Missouri into unknown territory, since the primary elections have already been held. Either way, appeals are likely. An affirmative judicial ruling on the constitutional amendment would likely send that measure to the ballot.
Under state law, the courts can only make changes to the ballot until September 8, eight weeks before the election.
Conservative though they may be compared to many voters on the coasts, Missourians appreciate the benefits of and threats to the direct-democracy voting rights that they’ve had for nearly 120 years. Well-organized citizens can single out issues that they deem consequential to their lives and work to steer them through the initiative process and then vote accordingly. The Amendment 4 results underlined that commitment and the ongoing fight to protect citizens’ voices.
