By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Representatives of the group Clean Missouri are mounting another campaign, this time to keep the initiative they succeeded in passing two years ago from changing this November.
Republicans in the Missouri legislature are asking voters to reconsider the legislative redistricting provisions of the Clean Missouri initiative.
Clean Missouri spokesman Sean Soendker Nicholson says voters two years ago approved a proposal making state House and Senate districts more competitive and he claims the changes pushed by Republicans in the legislature would create districts which protect incumbents.
“If you as a voter want to be able to pick who your representative is, if you want there to be consequences when politicians behave badly, there needs to be some districts where the election in November matters, where voters can fire their politician and hire a new one,” Soendker Nicholson tells St. Joseph Post.
Senate Joint Resolution 38, sponsored by state Sen. Dan Hegeman of Cosby, passed the General Assembly this year and will be on the ballot as Amendment 3 for voters to decide November 3rd.
Though the proposed amendment to the state constitution makes several changes to the Clean Missouri initiative approved by voters two years ago, its main aim is to change the legislative redistricting portion of the initiative. The Clean Missouri plan authorized the state demographer to redraw Missouri House and Senate Districts following the latest Census numbers. Republicans in the legislature have asked voters to take the task away from the state demographer and give it to commissions within the House and Senate. Republicans and Democrats would nominate members of the commissions to the governor for appointment.
Soendker Nicholson says legislative leaders have been misleading in claiming the portion requiring competitiveness would create badly distorted legislative districts which might weaken the rural voice.
“So, it doesn’t say every district has to be competitive,” according to Soendker Nicholson. “It says, overall, the full plan for all of the House districts, for all of the Senate districts, needs to be fair so that no party has an unfair advantage.”
Soendker Nicholson doesn’t see voters approving changes to a proposal they just approved.
“When voters learn about how politicians are trying to deceive them with Amendment 3 this year, when they learn about what politicians have put in the fine print, I feel very confident that this will be rejected and the mandate from voters for fairness and for independence in the redistricting process will be heard again,” Soendker Nicholson says.
Clean Missouri recently won a victory in court. A Missouri judge has thrown out the ballot language approved by Missouri legislators, claiming the November ballot wording was unjust and insufficient.
Cole County Circuit Judge Pat Joyce struck down the summary the legislature had written for a November ballot measure that would undo key parts of the 2018 initiative. She instead replaced it with a summary suggested by a group opposed to this year's measure. The state's Republican attorney general has stated he will appeal the ruling.
The 2018 measure made Missouri the first state to adopt a system in which a nonpartisan demographer would draw state House and Senate districts based on a mathematical formula designed to achieve “partisan fairness” and “competitiveness".
The Associated Press contributed to this story.