A bill to protect ballot summaries written by politicians from judicial revision passed the Missouri House on Wednesday, as lawmakers moved to restore a law struck down earlier this year by the state Supreme Court.
The legislation would give the secretary of state three chances to revise ballot summaries found to be insufficient or unfair before a judge could take over the job. And if the trial court judgment is overturned on appeal, the measure would require the appeals court to send it back to the trial court for revisions rather than make any changes.
State Rep. John Simmons, a Republican from Washington, said revising ballot summaries is a political job and “the courts for recent history have been actually circumventing the will of the General Assembly, the elected people in writing a lot of these statements on their own.”
The House voted 90-55 to approve the legislation, with all Democrats and nine Republicans opposed. It now moves to the Missouri Senate.
The bill is a response to a Jan. 23 decision that struck down a similar law passed last year. The court ruled that amendments to that bill went beyond its original purpose and violated the Missouri Constitution.
“We all know that’s a temper-tantrum reaction to (the law) being struck down,” state Rep. Martin Jacobs, a Democrat from Liberty, said during Wednesday’s debate. “It’s a kickback at the court, which is not what we should be in the business of doing.”
Every proposed statutory or constitutional change presented to voters includes a summary and estimate of the financial impact on state and local governments. The bill approved Wednesday would expand the limit, currently 50 words, to 100 words.
If backers or opponents of the ballot measure think the summary is unfair because it takes sides or is insufficient because it leaves out key elements, they can sue to have it changed.
Currently, if a court finds problems, the judge rewrites the language. If the bill approved on Wednesday becomes law, after finding a summary needs to be changed, the judge would send it to the secretary of state for revision.
The bill allows the secretary of state three chances, under increasingly tight deadlines, to write a ballot summary the judge will accept. If the revisions fail to satisfy the judge, he or she would then write a new summary.
The ballot summary provisions are a reaction to past rulings, especially in the lead-up to the 2024 vote making abortion legal again in the state. So far in this election cycle, the courts have rewritten ballot summaries for an initiative to ban vouchers for private school tuition, a constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal and another to change how majorities are calculated for constitutional amendments proposed by initiative.
The provisions putting ballot summary revisions in the hands of the secretary of state are intended to delay initiatives and protect “ballot candy” in summaries of measures sent to voters by the GOP majority, Democrats said Wednesday.
Republicans argued that the courts are biased and ballot summaries need to be protected from meddling.
“There is nowhere in the Constitution, there is nowhere in (state statutes),” state Rep. Darin Chappell, a Republican from Rogersville said, “wherein the courts have the authority to override and usurp the power of the legislature to establish their own wording.”
