After months of town halls, lots of surveys, two Policy Summits, and many meetings of our volunteer Policy Department, Respect Missouri Volunteers completed the final policy! In the 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:

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

• Allows voters to understand exactly what they’re voting on.

• Prohibits partisan politicians from deliberately using misleading ballot language to trick voters.

Preserve our century-old constitutional freedom to petition.

• Ensures citizens have the ability to be a check and balance on the legislature when they ignore our voices.

• Prohibits new laws making it more difficult for citizens to gather signatures or pass initiatives at the ballot box.

• Guarantees that this right exists for future generations of Missourians.

Make it harder for politicians to change or undo what the people have already voted on.

• Defends majority rule by requiring support from both parties to send any changes back to a vote of the people — 80% approval in both chambers. 

• Ensures voters have the final say. 

• Does NOT apply to any measures placed on the ballot by the legislature, which often have deceptive language.

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.

Amendment 6 functions as a vital check and balance within our state government. It ensures that while the legislature remains the primary lawmaking body, the specific will of the voters is given a higher level of constitutional endurance.

First, it will require ballot summaries to be clear, unbiased, fair, accurate, and easy to understand.

Second, it will Preserve our century-old constitutional freedom to petition.

Third, it will Make it harder for politicians to change or undo what the people have already voted 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 use every trick they can think of to try and stop us. But we will win!

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 preserve 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 118 years and we’d like to keep it for at least the next 118 more!

It would NOT reinstate repealed initiatives.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

Additional questions and answers here.