Amendment 3 appears to hang on for narrow victory to overhaul MO redistricting

A proposed constitutional amendment that would drastically change the way Missouri’s legislative districts are drawn appears to have passed by a narrow margin after holding a comfortable lead for most of the night.

With 96% of Missouri precincts reporting, Amendment 3 leads by a margin of 50.8% to 49.2%. Late returns tightened the contest considerably.

Just after midnight, the anti-Amendment 3 Clean Missouri campaign issued an apparent concession statement. “We are of course very disappointed that the politicians’ lies and deception appear to have been effective enough to pass Amendment 3,” the statement read.

In 2018, 62% of voters approved the Clean Missouri initiative, an ethics reform package that provided for the appointment of a nonpartisan state demographer to redraw house and senate districts. Amendment 3 would do away with the demographer position, which was designed to prioritize partisan fairness and competitiveness.

Amendment 3 would also lower the limit on lobbying gifts from $5 to $0 and reduce campaign contributions for senate candidates by $100, but critics say these relatively minor changes are a smoke screen to get redistricting changes passed.

Proponents of the proposed amendment say the Democrats who supported a demographer wanted to boost their fortunes by diluting the voting power of rural Missourians.

“We’ve just been trying to keep the focus on the fact that we want to keep communities whole and not split them up for political reasons,” said Eric Bohl, director of public affairs and advocacy for the Missouri Farm Bureau. “Voting yes on Amendment 3 keeps our voices in the capital and not putting redistricting into the hands of people that would split it up just to achieve a partisan outcome.”

Another proposed amendment that would impose two-term limits on the lieutenant governor and other statewide elected officials appears to have been rejected with roughly 53% opposition.

Amendment 3, championed by Andrew County Republican Sen. Dan Hegeman and the GOP-dominated Missouri General Assembly, would install governor-appointed house and senate commissions to redraw districts following the 2020 census instead of the demographer.

The proposed amendment still contemplates partisan fairness and competitiveness in redrawn districts, but that would be a lower priority than in Clean Missouri.

Critics of Amendment 3 call it “Dirty Missouri” and say eliminating lobbyist gifts when the limits are already so low is a bad faith effort to make the amendment sound like sweeping ethics reform.

“That’s the smokescreen,” said Sean Soendker Nicholson, a spokesman for Clean Missouri. “That’s the tell that they’re doing something nefarious.”

But Amendment 3 supporters say there’s value in doing away with lobbyist gifts — no matter how small they may be.

“It’s going from something to nothing,” Bohl said. “Getting rid of them just creates a bright line.”

The amendment summary language on the ballot lists the redistricting changes third of three bullet points behind the provisions eliminating gifts and lowering campaign contributions to state senate candidates.

In August, Cole County Circuit Judge Patricia Joyce ruled that the Amendment 3 summary language was “insufficient and unfair” because it failed to inform voters that the measure would effectively reverse rules “Missourians overwhelmingly adopted two years ago to combat political gerrymandering.”

Joyce ordered the summary rewritten to display the redistricting changes first, but the Missouri Court of Appeals subsequently approved a considerably more limited revision that kept the proposed redistricting changes as the last bullet point.

Another change in Amendment 3 is language about who gets counted for the purpose of creating legislative districts. Under Clean Missouri, total population in the state and in each district is counted, meaning anyone living there.

Amendment 3 calls for a “one person, one vote” approach to counting. Critics say this terminology is confusing and could potentially be interpreted to mean that only eligible voters would be counted for the purposes of creating legislative maps.

Nicholson said that means noncitizens and children in particular may be excluded from population counts. Such a metric could potentially hurt representation in bigger cities, he said.

Asked what the “one person, one vote” idea means, Missouri solicitor general John Sauer acknowledged earlier this year that it could exclude people who aren’t eligible to vote.

“One person, one vote, the criteria is based on the number of actual eligible voters in a relevant district as opposed to an absolute population,” Sauer said.

An analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice said if only eligible voters are counted, more than one-quarter of Missourians are left off the population counts.

This story was originally published November 3, 2020 at 7:03 PM.