Republican proposals to limit Missouri’s petition process an ‘assault’ on democracy

The assault on democracy in Missouri continues. Republicans want to make it more difficult and costlier to put issues on the ballot.

The Missouri House of Representatives has debated no fewer than 10 pieces of legislation to limit the use of the initiative petition process, which ballooned from 55 submissions in 2008 to 371 in 2018.

And Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, the state’s chief elections officer, supports several of those GOP-backed bills.

Ashcroft says it’s too easy to amend the state’s constitution by way of the initiative petition process. He may have a point. But enacting laws independent of the legislature is enshrined in the state constitution.

One proposal, House Bill 1055, would add a refundable $350 fee to file an initiative. Another plan, House Bill 290, would require a $500 filing fee and an all-new additional fee of 40 cents per signature.

Filing fees don’t hurt well-to-do millionaires (or billionaires), but they might prevent average citizens from filing a petition, Democrats say.

“I don’t like the idea that we can’t afford democracy, so we’re going to charge people to participate,” said House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Democrat from Springfield.

In a release, Quade called the proposed measures “a Republican assault on direct democracy.” That assessment carries weight in a state that saw several successful citizen-led petitions placed on the ballot in 2018.

Last year, voters approved raising the minimum wage, imposed ethics reform, legalized medical marijuana and protected workers’ rights on initiatives started by petition.

“Sometimes direct democracy is the only way to achieve progress when an unresponsive legislature refuses to act on important issues,” Quade said.

Some Republicans believe special interest groups on both sides of the political aisle use the process to circumvent the legislature. Other GOP supporters say if the goal is to discourage moneyed interests from using the initiative petition process, this is the wrong tactic.

“They’ll just spend more money,” Carl Bearden, CEO of the conservative nonprofit United for Missouri, told The Star.

The current initiative process has it flaws. But it works. It takes more than 100,000 signatures to put a proposed law on the ballot and 160,000 for a constitutional change. The signatures must come from diverse geographic areas as well.

Only five of the 371 petitions submitted to the secretary of state’s office in 2018 made it to the ballot, which suggests safeguards are firmly in place.

We contend the state’s petition process needs minor tweaks — not a dramatic, partisan-led overhaul.

A reasonable filing fee, refundable to petitioners who eventually gather enough valid signatures, may make sense to deter people from filing dozens of empty proposals. But an additional per-signature filing fee makes no sense.

Missourians don’t pay to vote, and they shouldn’t be required to pay for exercising their right to sign a petition.

Why would the GOP want to take power away from the people they represent? This seems like a coordinated effort to keep people from participating in democracy.

Making it harder and more expensive to initiate a petition and place it on the ballot is not the way to go about ensuring the will of Missourians are heard on Election Day.

This story was originally published April 3, 2019 at 2:17 PM.