We have exciting news! After months of town halls, lots of surveys, two Policy Summits, and many meetings of our volunteer Policy Department, we have our final policy! In our last vote, 95% of our supporters who voted chose this version of our ballot initiative. Volunteers have told us how happy they are that this is a strong policy that focuses on the will of all Missouri voters being followed and providing a clear, fair, and unbiased process for citizens getting laws on the ballot.

Together, our cross-partisan coalition’s ballot initiative will:

Prohibit the legislature from overturning or changing initiatives passed by voters unless an 80% bipartisan supermajority sends changes to voters to approve.

• Any change must be approved by voters before it can take effect.

• Protects initiatives passed after January 1, 2010 that are still in law or the Constitution when this amendment goes into effect, as well as initiatives in the future. Protects citizen referendum petition vetoes after January 1, 2010 and in the future.

• Does not protect measures placed on the ballot by the legislature, which often have deceptive language.

Require ballot summaries to be clear, unbiased, fair, accurate, and easy to understand.

• Citizens may challenge misleading ballot summaries by asking courts to revise them to be clear, unbiased, fair, accurate, and easy to understand. If the ballot summary changes, citizens’ prior signatures remain valid.

Protect our constitutional freedom of the initiative petition and referendum process.

• Prohibits any legislative changes making it more difficult to gather signatures or pass initiatives at the ballot box.

See this visual breakdown of the ballot language.

The ballot summary is the 100 words that will be printed on every ballot to summarize our policy. It’s the thing voters will see when deciding whether they want to vote yes or no on our proposal. It reads:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:

• expand the initiative and referendum petition process by making it a fundamental right;

• allow courts to revise ballot summaries through lawsuits;

• prohibit the legislature from weakening initiative or referendum powers;

• prohibit the legislature from changing or repealing laws enacted through the initiative process, or passing laws similar to those rejected by referendum, without approval from at least 80% of both chambers; and

• preserve existing majority vote and signature requirements for initiative and referendum petitions?

• State and local governmental entities estimate no costs or savings

Check out our 1-Pager Explainer Document for more details.

If you’d like to read the full proposed Constitutional Amendment, please visit this link.

Broadly speaking, there are three pieces of the Respect Missouri Voters constitutional amendment. First, it is going to protect voter initiatives by prohibiting the legislature from changing or repealing voter initiatives unless by a 80% bi-partisan super majority in the House and Senate.

Second, it will ban the legislature from referring any law or constitutional amendment that will make the initiative process more difficult. Voters will be the only ones who could approve changes to the initiative process.

Third, it is going to ban the legislature from deceiving voters with misleading or confusing language and it is going to require clear, fair, accurate ballot language so voters understand what they are voting on.

Our amendment will ban the legislature from overturning things we voted for, except with an 80% bi-partisan super majority, and even then it must go back to a vote of the people. So if a super-majority of the legislature doesn’t like what the voters have passed, they can ask the voters to reconsider. That means that after our initiative passes, laws passed by citizen-led initiative petition will be stronger, more secure.

There is a model for this threshold in other states and when we held townhalls across Missouri we heard from people that they wanted a guarantee that if the legislature wants to send something back to voters asking them to overturn what they already voted for, the legislature’s decision must be cross-partisan. 80% provides a high-level of confidence that one party could not impose changes to voters’ will single handedly.

A constitutional amendment approved by voters cannot be overturned by politicians on their own. They have to send it back to the people for a vote, and they have to follow our state’s laws and constitution when they do. Politicians would have to follow the rules laid out in our amendment if they wanted to overturn it, which would mean they need at least 80% of the legislature to agree it needed to be changed - and even if they got 80% of the legislature to agree, they would have to use clear and honest language on the ballot, so they couldn’t try to trick us into voting to undo it!

Yes, and ultimately we heard from the people of Missouri that they are sick of rehashing these fights every 5-10 years. They felt that if anything did need something like an administrative change or to fix an unintended consequence then the legislature could come together to suggest those changes to the voters.

No! Politicians in Jefferson City have repeatedly undone the will of the voters, and because we know they do not respect our votes and have tried multiple times to gut the initiative petition process in Missouri, we know they will try anything to make us fail. They will heavily scrutinize the signatures we turn in. They are trying to trick voters by naming their amendment that would make it impossible for popular citizen-led initiatives to pass the “Protect Missouri Voters” amendment. They will use every trick they can think of to try and stop us. But we will win! Is this about making abortion legal?

No, our goal is to require language on ballots to be clear and accurate, stop politicians from overturning initiatives that were passed by voters, and protect our 100-year-old freedom of the initiative petition. It is not about any one petition, this will impact the ability for voters now and decades from now to have the final say on what policies should impact our state and constitution. The initiative process has been a Missouri tradition and in our constitution for the last 117 years and we’d like to keep it for at least the next 117 more!

Politicians introduced a competing measure with almost the same name, and it would take away our freedom to use the citizen-led initiative petition process. So we need to defeat the politicians' attack on the ballot, and then pass ours. Then we can finally stop politicians from tricking voters with confusing ballot language!

Ultimately the Secretary of State will decide this, and as soon as we know we will mobilize for that election.

It would NOT reinstate repealed initiatives. But it would protect whatever is still in law or the constitution, if it was passed after Jan 1 2010.

Additional questions and answers here.