Missouri appeals court rewrites summary of GOP redistricting proposal on November ballot

The Missouri Court of Appeals on Monday rejected lawmakers’ summary of a Republican-backed proposal to repeal changes to the state’s redistricting process and ordered new wording days before a deadline to finalize language for the November 3 ballot.

A three-judge panel unanimously ordered the ballot summary for Amendment 3 to say that approval of the measure would change the redistricting process approved by voters in 2018. The state faces a Sept. 8 deadline for changes to the ballot.

The Missouri Attorney General’s Office will likely move to have the case transferred to the state Supreme Court – effectively an appeal. A spokesman declined to comment further since the case is ongoing.

In 2018, voters overwhelmingly approved the Clean Missouri initiative, which replaced bipartisan commissions with a non-partisan state demographer to draw legislative boundaries based on the 2020 census. Under the previous system, commissions appointed by Republican and Democratic committees and the governor drafted maps.

Amendment 3 would replace the Clean Missouri system with a Republican-supported plan that largely takes the state back to the old method.

The ballot summary approved by lawmakers says Amendment 3 will “Create citizen-led independent bipartisan commissions” to draw districts that will be based on “minority voter protection, compactness, competitiveness, fairness” and other criteria.

In a written decision, the judges found that the summary written by legislators “fails to acknowledge” what the amendment would actually do, which is “substantially modify, and reorder, the redistricting criteria approved by voters” in 2018.

The judges found three “major problems” in the summary:

• The summary doesn’t reference the demographer
• The summary’s description of the redistricting commissions as citizen-led and independent “fails to accurately the membership and operation of the commissions
• The summary falsely implies the amendment establishes criteria to guide redistricting when in fact the criteria already exist in the state constitution

Missouri Solicitor General John Sauer, in defending the legislator-written summary, had previously said a look at the dictionary definition of words such as “independent” supports the accuracy of the summary.

The judges ordered the summary to say that Amendment 3 would transfer responsibility for drawing districts from the non-partisan demographer to Governor-appointed bipartisan commissions. The summary would also say that the redistricting process approved in 2018 would be changed by “modifying and reordering the redistricting criteria.”

The Court of Appeals rewrite of the ballot summary is more limited than the sweeping one previously ordered by a Cole County judge. Still, the court found that certain aspects of the summary “are unfair and insufficient” and required revisions.

“The fact is that the politicians pushing this incumbent-protection plan know voters will hate what’s in the fine print, so they tried to trick voters with dishonest ballot language. And now two courts have ruled that they broke the law with their deception,” Sean Soendker Nicholson, director of the No on Amendment 3 campaign, said in a statement.

The decision came after the Court of Appeals judges heard oral arguments on Friday.

This story was originally published August 31, 2020 at 4:59 PM.