By Mike Wolff

The Missouri Constitution is the people’s constitution. Every word of it has been approved by a simple majority statewide vote. For 118 years, important provisions of our constitution have been proposed by the people themselves, not by legislators or other elected officials.

So why is the Missouri Legislature asking voters to severely limit our right to engage in this purest form of direct democracy?

The centerpiece of Amendment 4, on the August 4 ballot, is the requirement that citizen initiative proposals be approved by a majority vote in each congressional district.

That sounds nice, of course, but Missouri voters are smart enough to ask the best question I’ve ever heard about proposals for legislative or constitutional change: I know what it says, but what does it do?

If approved, the requirement that a citizen-led amendment win in eight out of the state’s eight congressional districts simply means that if it gets less than a majority in a single district, it will lose. The current requirement is a simple majority statewide.

This new requirement would apply only to citizen-initiated proposals – not to proposals referred to our ballots by the Legislature. Some would call this a power grab by Jefferson City insiders. I won’t argue with them.

If Amendment 4 had been in effect, all the citizen initiatives since 2020 would have failed, according to an analysis by The Missouri Independent.

Supporters say this is a way to empower rural voters and keep measures from being enacted by big majorities in urban and suburban areas. But that works both ways, as The Independent’s reporting tells us.

In 2016, a citizen initiative to keep sales taxes from being extended to previously untaxed services was passed with 57% of the statewide vote. If Amendment 4 had been in the Constitution then, the sales tax restriction would have failed because it did not get a majority of votes in the First Congressional District (the city of St. Louis and areas of St. Louis County). The result? A proposal favored by a majority of rural voters would have been killed by a minority of urban voters from one congressional district.

Under Amendment 4, the cost of defeating a citizen proposal would plummet. Opponents of a citizen-initiated proposal could find one congressional district where polling indicates the voters would be receptive to a negative campaign and bombard that district with negative messages. So the battle would be fought between supporters who have to wage a statewide campaign, while opponents would only have to wage a campaign in one district.

Amendment 4’s requirement that citizen initiatives pass in all eight congressional districts gives veto power to about 156,000 voters over the votes of most of the state’s 2.99 million or so voters who cast ballots in 2024.

That’s a superpower for the nay-voters, who could be as low as about 5% of the state’s total who voted in 2024, according to The Missouri Independent’s analysis.

Amendment 4 backers note that some of the measures that passed with a simple majority statewide – notably, marijuana legalization and reproductive rights amendments – would have failed if required to get a majority in each Congressional district. These measures, along with the constitutional sales tax restrictions that passed in 2016, came to the ballot by citizen initiatives because they could not get support from the Legislature.

The citizen initiative, first enacted in Missouri in 1908, is a popular check on legislatures that don’t follow the will of the majority. Missouri’s direct democracy also includes provisions for citizen-initiated changes in Missouri statutes and the exercise of a veto by voters on laws enacted by the Legislature.

In each case, the Constitution prescribes the portion of voters whose signatures are required to put the proposal on the state’s ballot. But Amendment 4 would impose its win-every-district requirement only on changes to the Constitution proposed by citizens, and not on those proposed by the Legislature.

Doesn’t that impose a permanent disadvantage on voters in rural areas, who seem to be a concern of Amendment 4’s supporters?

Rural voters, though not a statewide majority, helped pass the citizen initiatives that Amendment 4 supporters oppose. Marijuana legalization and reproductive rights protections would have failed without significant support from rural voters.

For these voters – as with all voters seeking change – the citizen initiatives give them power when they feel shut out by their representatives in Jefferson City.

Love it or hate it, this is direct democracy. Section 1 of Article I of our Missouri Constitution proclaims: “That all political power is vested in and derived from the people; that all government of right originates from the people, is founded upon their will only, and is instituted for the good of the whole.”

Without direct democracy, we cannot bypass a legislative majority that won’t do what most Missouri voters want. Do we really want our state government to be a mini version of Washington, D.C.?

If so, Amendment 4 may be the answer. But Missouri voters have said no to a lot of cockamamy ideas in the past. There’s reason to hope they will say no to this one.

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Michael A. Wolff is former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Missouri and professor emeritus and former dean of St. Louis University Law School.

Learn about the NO on Amendment 4 campaign at www.ProtectMOjorityRule.com