Missouri voters rejected Amendment 4, blocking a Republican-led effort to raise the bar for citizen-led constitutional amendments and keep the current income tax petition rules in place. The measure would have required those amendments to win a majority in each congressional district instead of a simple statewide majority.
Ed Lewis, a Republican state Rep., first proposed the change and said earlier this month on a radio program, "This amendment is really an amendment to protect our Constitution." He also said, "We have the absolute lowest and weakest process and that’s why we’ve had six initiative petitions passed in the last eight years that have really done real harm to our state and to our Constitution."
Amendment 4 and Missouri
Missouri current law lets citizen-led ballot measures pass with a simple statewide majority. Amendment 4 would have added a district-by-district hurdle for citizen-led constitutional amendments, while measures referred from the Legislature would not have faced the same requirement. Missouri is one of 26 states that allows voters to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot through petition.
That distinction mattered because Missouri voters have recently used the same process to advance abortion rights, expand Medicaid and legalize marijuana. Hannah Ledford, deputy director of the Fairness Project, said the proposal could have left Missouri's direct democracy process "functionally dead," and she described it as "the strictest passage threshold in the country for citizen-initiated ballot measures only".
AdImpact Spending
AdImpact said opponents of the proposal spent more than $6 million on broadcast ads. AdImpact also said the measure's backers did not air any broadcast ads. The campaign against Amendment 5 also used ads that argued against Amendment 4, tying the two measures together for voters.
The result leaves Missouri's statewide-majority standard unchanged for citizen-led constitutional amendments. For voters using the petition process, the practical effect is straightforward: the threshold did not move to district-by-district approval, so the same statewide path remains available for future ballot drives.
North Dakota and Utah
The Missouri vote also lands alongside similar fights elsewhere. In November, North Dakota and South Dakota voters will decide whether to bump the threshold up from a statewide majority to 60%. In Utah, a similar measure will be on the fall ballot specifically related to tax increases.
Earlier Tuesday, Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins said a referendum that sought to undo the new map would not appear on the state's ballot, and he said the referendum was unconstitutional. That ruling left the amendment fight in Missouri to voters, and they rejected the change.
