Clean Missouri claims Republicans tricked voters
Amendment 3 has been passed by Missourians with a margin just shy of 60,000 votes. This means that governor-appointed bipartisan commissions, rather than a nonpartisan state demographer, will now draw legislative districts.
Amendment 3 won statewide by more than 50,000 votes, 51% to 49%.
Amendment 3 also states that district maps will be based on the eligible voter population of the state, meaning children and non-citizens would not count when the districts are drawn.
“What it’s really about is how politicians want to draw their own district maps. They want to choose their voters instead of having the voters choose them,” said Louise Wilkerson in October. She is co-president of the League of Women Voters of Metro St. Louis.
The Brennan Center and Schwartznegger Institute have independently conducted studies on this amendment. The former states that excluding children and noncitizens would exacerbate racial inequities and result in more than a quarter of Missourians left uncounted — including 21% of Missouri’s white population compared to 28% of the state’s Black population, 54% of its Asian population and 54%of its Latino population.
The passage of Amendment 3 reverses the Clean Missouri Amendment passed by an almost 2-to-1 margin in 2018, which transferred the task of redrawing legislative districts to a nonpartisan demographer. The Clean Missouri organization released a statement late Tuesday night.
“We are of course very disappointed that the politicians’ lies and deception appear to have been effective enough to pass Amendment 3. Thousands of volunteers from across the state and across the political spectrum have been working for years to pass and then defend fair redistricting rules in our constitution, and today we came up short,” Clean Missouri stated.
“Nevertheless, we are committed to ensuring as fair an outcome as possible when new maps are drawn in 2021. Amendment 3 was written to allow for truly radical gerrymandering, but it does not require it. The broad, bipartisan coalition that passed the Clean Missouri Amendment will be active and engaged in the 2021 redistricting process to ensure that voters and communities come first in new maps, not politicians.”
Sean Soendker Nicholson, who was leading the effort to defeat the amendment, told The St. Louis American in October that politicians and lobbyists tried to trick voters with this amendment.
“They want super-safe incumbent protection maps, regardless of what voters are saying that they want from their legislature,” he said. “To do that they are going to need to trick voters, that is their plan, to be able to trick voters with the $5 lobbyist gift change and hope that voters don’t pay attention to what’s going on in the fine print. So we know that in the fine print that there are redistricting details [and] policies unlike anything Missouri has ever seen and unlike anything else in the United States.”