Whether Missouri legalizes abortion and sports betting, allows a casino at the Lake of the Ozarks or raises the minimum wage hinges on whether state and local officials judge that most of 1.25 million signatures on four petitions are legitimate.
The secretary of state’s office has three more weeks to process the petitions and ship them to county clerks to verify the signatures. Those clerks need to return their reports to Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s office no later than July 30 to prepare for the November vote.
It’s a time-consuming process that requires expertise. And the clock is ticking for local election offices already under deadline to get ready for the Aug. 6 primary elections.
What does it take for initiative petitions to qualify for the ballot?
Most proposals are constitutional amendments that require about 171,000 valid signatures across the state to qualify. The question about minimum wage and paid sick leave would change state law, meaning it needs just over 107,000 signatures to make it onto the ballot.
Here’s what the groups turned in to the secretary of state’s office last week:
- Missourians for Constitutional Freedom (constitutional amendment for access to abortion): 380,000 signatures
- Winning for Missouri Education (constitutional amendment to legalize sports gambling): 340,000 signatures
- Osage River Gaming & Convention (constitutional amendment to allow a casino at the Lake of the Ozarks): 320,000 signatures
- Missourians for Healthy Families and Fair Wages (state law change raising Missouri’s minimum wage, with cost of living increases): 210,000 signatures
But it isn’t just the raw number of signatures that counts. Each ballot question needs enough people signing petitions from at least six of Missouri’s eight congressional districts.
The campaigns haven’t released the numbers of signatures they have in each congressional district.
In both 2022 and 2020, efforts to legalize recreational marijuana and expand Medicaid fell short in the largely rural and conservative 4th and 8th Congressional Districts.
But campaigns for abortion access and sports betting say they’ve gathered signatures from across the state and every congressional district.
How signature verification works
Now that the petition forms are in the hands of the secretary of state’s office, workers there will start removing staples and scanning the forms into the state’s digitized system, a newer tool available to local election authorities across the state.
State officials there have four weeks to ship all of those signatures off to their respective local authorities for actual verification at the county level.
So far, county clerks say they haven’t gotten their large instruction email from Ashcroft’s office. But they’re feeling the time pinch.
“Especially when we don’t start getting petitions until the middle of May,” said Tammy Brown, the Republican director of the Jackson County Board of Elections. “We’ve got an election to build, plus trying to get the petitions knocked out.”
A digital tool designed by Ashcroft’s office scans petitions so county clerks can compare the signatures on a petition with voter registration signatures on file with their offices. That should streamline the process by showing the signatures side-by-side on a computer screen, versus comparing on a computer screen and on the physical petition form itself.
Each signature is independently verified by a county clerk staffer. But with the sheer number of signatures they need to verify or reject this year, they’ll have to move quickly.
Brown said her office can only spend about five to seven minutes trying to find a voter if they can’t read what’s filled out on the petition. Sometimes the name will be illegible, but a staffer will be able to make out the house number on the address the voter wrote down.
“If we can’t find them on file, we move on,” Brown said. “With all the petitions we get in, if we spent 10 to 15 minutes on every voter, we’d never finish.”
Election officials have until July 30 to process all of the signatures, said secretary of state spokesperson JoDonn Chaney.
Then, the state will have another two weeks to verify the reports from counties and sort out which petitions voters will see on their ballots in November.
After that deadline, any citizen can file a lawsuit with the Cole County Circuit Court challenging the secretary’s decision on whether the initiatives qualify for a statewide vote.
Usually, campaigns go this route if they feel that valid signatures have been disqualified by the counties. Courts will be asked to fast-track those cases and issue a decision as quickly as possible, but that decision can still be appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court for up to 10 days.
