After turning in over 38,000 petition signatures last month, Reform St. Louis has successfully triggered a special election April 5 for city residents to cast their vote on the charter amendment.
The coalition was left in limbo for several days as the St. Louis Board of Elections worked to not only review the signatures but then determine whether it would be voted on in April or later in the year.
Benjamin Borgmeyer, Board of Elections Democratic director, on Monday said that while the coalition met the signature count threshold (10% of the city’s registered voters or about 20,141) to qualify the petition, it did not quite meet the 15% (or about 30,212 signatures) threshold needed to trigger a special election.
This means at least 20% of the signatures were thrown out by the St. Louis Board of Elections and not counted.
“So, they had enough signatures to trigger the next general election [in November 2022], but not enough to trigger a special election [in April],” Borgmeyer said.
Around 3 p.m. Monday, however, Borgmeyer was able to confirm the petition will be voted on in April.
The proposition shifts this year’s redistricting task from the Board of Aldermen to an independent citizen redistricting commission.
Reform St. Louis was not immediately available for comment on the announcement of the April 5 election.
“We are proud that Proposition R for Reform will be on a 2022 ballot for more transparency, accountability, and equity at the Board of Aldermen,” LaShana Lewis, Show Me Integrity board member, said in a prepared statement last week once the signatures were counted but the election date yet to be determined.
The proposition would shift this year’s redistricting task from the Board of Aldermen to an independent citizen redistricting commission.
City voters passed the ward reduction in a 2012 election, which stipulated that the new 14 wards (down from the current 28) would be redrawn after the 2020 census. It laid out a plan in which the first election in the newly drawn wards would be held in 2023 for all wards and aldermanic president. Odd-numbered wards would start with two-year terms, to stay in line with the election schedule set by the city’s charter in 1915. The Board president and even-numbered wards would run during that initial election for a full four-year term.
However, it remains unclear whether the passage of this proposition in April will be too late to take effect in drawing the new 14 wards. While Prop R coalition members have been adamant the formation of a citizen commission will give them time to redraw the boundaries for the 2023 election, Aldermanic President Lewis Reed disagrees.
He and Alderman Joseph Vollmer, Ward 10, co-sponsored legislation that was introduced Sept. 24 that would eventually contain the new ward boundaries, created by a committee of alderpeople.
On Sept. 28, the board’s legislation committee held a meeting to overview the process.
“Well, we legally have to be done with this by the end of the year, so we are moving forward,” Vollmer, the committee’s chair, said in that meeting. “So, the ballot proposition is their worry not ours, we do our job, we do what we are supposed to do.”
Reed explained in that meeting that he believes if Prop R is passed by the voters in April it would only apply to the next redistricting process in 10 years, because the wards would have already been drawn.
Proposition R also includes a host of other reforms, such as decreasing the influence of big money by stopping aldermanic conflicts of interest; preventing the Board of Aldermen from overriding the will of voters; and ensuring the public knows if an alderman has a personal conflict of interest in something they are voting on.
Reform St. Louis is an organization established by Show Me Integrity, which last year campaigned in support of the city’s new nonpartisan approval voting system.
