If you want your vote to count, vote no on Amendment 3

There are many important races on the ballot this year. My race for Missouri Attorney General is one of them. But the most important vote you will cast on Nov. 3 won’t be for any of the candidates. It will be voting to protect the future of democracy in our state by voting no on Amendment 3.

Amendment 3 would undo what 62% of us voted to do in 2018, when we passed Clean Missouri and put an end to partisan gerrymandering. We voted to take the power to draw legislative districts out of the hands of politicians and give it to a nonpartisan demographer, who is required by law to replace our gerrymandered legislative districts with fair and competitive ones.

That scared the career politicians in Jefferson City, which is how Amendment 3 found its way onto your ballot. Up until now, most Missouri legislators have enjoyed districts that all but ensure their reelection, regardless of what the voters of our state do at the polls.

The 2018 election is a case in point. In that election, Democratic candidates for the Missouri House of Representatives won nearly 45% of the votes across the state. But they captured only 30% of the seats.

The results in the state Senate races were even more lopsided. Republicans in those races won nearly 59% of the votes — but they secured 82% of the open seats. Not a single seat shifted control from one party to the other.

Those disproportionate numbers should frighten anyone who worries about the future of our democracy. But the real danger of gerrymandering isn’t about numbers. It’s about voters.

Your right to vote is not just the right to fill out a ballot. It is the right to choose who represents you. More important, it’s the right to change who represents you. And that is the right that gerrymandering takes away.

Politicians who come from gerrymandered districts don’t have to worry about what their voters want, since they know they are guaranteed to win their general elections. All they have to worry about is what their party wants, because the only way they can lose their seats is by losing their primaries. And when legislators know that party loyalty, not voter approval, decides their political futures, they have no incentive to cross the aisle and work with the other party to pass even broadly popular legislation.

That rotten state of affairs may be great for political parties, but it’s no good for voters. That’s why we overwhelmingly passed Clean Missouri in 2018. Having fair and competitive districts will make it harder for incumbents to coast to reelection. It will make them worry once again about the concerns of their constituents. And it will incentivize them to seek bipartisan consensus, rather than deepen the partisan divide.

That will happen only if we vote down Amendment 3. But the politicians in Jefferson City have pushed language onto the November ballot that is designed to deceive you. My opponent in the November election, our unelected Attorney General Eric Schmitt, has defended ballot language for Amendment 3 that two different courts found to be misleading. Even though the courts rejected his arguments, Amendment 3 still obscures what is really at stake.

Amendment 3 isn’t really about lobbyist gifts or campaign contribution limits. It is about protecting the vote you took in 2018 to end gerrymandering in this state. It is about making your vote count. Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, an independent or none of the above, if you care about your vote, then I urge you to vote no on Amendment 3. The future of our democracy quite literally depends on it.

Rich Finneran is a former federal prosecutor and the Democratic candidate for Missouri Attorney General.

This story was originally published October 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "If you want your vote to count, vote no on Amendment 3."