- [Narrator] Flatland is brought to you in part through the generous support of AARP, the Health Forward Foundation, and RSM.

- Hi, I'm D. Rashaan Gilmore.

Welcome to Flatland.

Every month we dig into one issue, that's raising questions, causing tensions, or has gone curiously unexplored in our area.

For this episode, we'll be talking about the ballot initiative process in Missouri.

(electronic music) Missouri happens to be one of 26 states in the country that allows its citizens to put issues directly on the ballot by gathering enough signatures across the state.

This process is what allowed Missourians to approve Riverboat Gaming, expand Medicaid, and legalize medical marijuana.

But the journey from policy idea to amendment can be a very daunting challenge.

Let's take a look at what it takes to exercise this democratic power.

(calm music) - Our country's not perfect, but at least in an aspirational sense, our country tried to be founded on the idea of minority rights with majority rule.

The Missouri Constitution retains the right for the people to use the initiative petition process.

Anyone can file a prospective change in constitution or law with the Secretary of State's Office.

- First of all, people need to come together, and write the initiative.

Once that's written, it gets submitted to the Secretary of State's Office.

- We will go ahead and we will send a copy of your prospective change off to the State Auditor's Office.

The State Auditor will work on what's called the fiscal note and that's to inform the people of the state, how would that affect the finances of the state, so it's gonna cost the state money, it's gonna make the state money, it's gonna cost counties' money, it's gonna make them money, exactly what that is.

While the State Auditor's doing that, the Secretary of State's office starts going through the actual legal language of either the statute proposed, statutory change, or constitutional change.

We outline all the changes it would make, because we have 100 words in which to concisely, completely, and clearly explain to anyone what that change would do.

Attorney General's Office signs off on whether or not he thinks those meet the legal requirements, and then we send it to the individual that wants to have the IP that filed it with us, and they now have what they need to go, and start collecting signatures in six of the eight congressional districts.

- We would need 8% of the votes from the last election, which would bring us to about right up under 172,000 signatures in order to qualify for the ballot.

Smart campaigners will definitely go for way more than that, because we know some of them might get tossed out, somebody might not sign it correctly.

- We then digitally send those signatures to the 116 election authorities across the state checking to make sure that the individuals are registered voters, that the signatures match.

- Once we do meet the threshold of signatures, the Secretary of State issues a certificate.

- We gave out either a certificate of sufficiency, if an initiative petition had met the requirements for signature collection or a certificate of insufficiency, if they hadn't met the requirement for signatures.

Then there is judicial review if people want, we write a ballot summary, that puts it onto the ballot.

- Still the work isn't finished.

Now we have to educate our community more, like, what does this really mean?

Let's get all of these questions answered.

The final step is turn out to the polls, right?

We need people to actually vote on it.

- The initiative process began to become popular again, in terms of being used widely in the 1970s.

Conservatives discovered that they could get around liberal state legislatures, over the last decade, decade and a half, when conservatives have enjoyed greater strength at the state legislative level, it's liberals who have now rediscovered the utility.

- Increasingly over the last 10 years, voters have sought to go around the legislature to enact policy that otherwise has stalled out, medical marijuana was a good example, so was Medicaid expansion in 2020.

- Medicaid expansion was something that a lot of people believed in, even no matter what their political ideology was.

States had the opportunity to expand in 2010, 2011, and Missouri decided not to, the state would've been able to get 100% reimbursement for the first decade.

And so we basically missed the opportunity.

Politics was getting in the way of good policy.

Gathering signatures is relatively difficult.

- And getting people to sign up, like, where do you wanna work?

Where is your expertise?

Where do you wanna be?

Do you wanna gather signatures?

Do you wanna be a trainer?

Do you wanna, do you have space where we can host, or thinking about, you know, visuals and graphics and marketing, and all those kinds of things.

And we're also thinking about fundraising.

So it's a lot, it's a heavy process.

It's a lot of work.

- [It is an arduous, expensive, risky proposition.

The recreational marijuana proposal this year is a great example.

They invested tons into signature gathering, and just barely made it.

- And, you know, we had about four or 500 people collecting signatures by April on a daily basis, the number that you need is based on turnout from the last gubernatorial election of the 2020 elections, you know, shattered turnout records, so we ended up having to pay basically three times what we paid on the medical campaign to get this on the ballot.

- It'll take you about an hour to gather eight to 10 signatures, and for Medicaid, we submitted 350,000.

So ... - And it's something that has increasingly gotten under the skin of Republican lawmakers who have super majorities in the legislature, and they're watching these ballot measures being pushed, for the most part by liberal interests, and voters overwhelmingly approving them.

And so one of the things that they've tried to do for several years now is make it harder to either get something onto the ballot, or pass something when it's on the ballot, especially when it comes to a constitutional amendment.

- Let me tell you a little bit about House Joint Resolution 79.

It will put before the Missouri voters the question, is the simple majority to change the Constitution versus state to lower threshold?

- [Jason Hancock] They increased the number of signatures you would need, increased the cost, increased the number of congressional districts that you have to collect signatures.

There's some that wanna say that the legislature has a veto over it or increase the threshold.

So maybe instead of 51%, you have to get 60%.

- It's motivated entirely by politics.

It's a very partisan measure.

You have conservative Republicans who are reacting to the fact that liberal Democrats have been successful at the ballot box over the last 10 years, forgetting that it was conservatives who used that same device to get their measures put into place.

- And it's worth noting, this is a constitutionally protected right, the initiative petition process, so ironically, in order to make it harder to amend the Constitution, this would have to go on the ballot, and voters would get the way in.

And so there might be a spirited campaign about whether to amend the Constitution, to make it harder to amend the Constitution.

- We need to hold onto every single piece of power that we have, and there are our initiative processes it.

- 'Cause the legislator could just, you know, they have bills, they can put something on the ballot, but we have to do all this work to get something on there.

(gentle piano music) About 200,000 people have been able to apply this year, like I can't believe that our collective power actually made an impact, but it definitely wouldn't have been like that, if we didn't put grassroots pressure on the State of Missouri.

We basically have the opportunity to participate in direct democracy, 'cause every vote actually counts.

(gentle piano music ending) - All right, welcome back for the discussion portion of today's program.

With us in studio today is Peverill Squire, Political Science Professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, McClain Bryant Macklin Director of Policy and Strategic Initiatives at the Health Forward Foundation, Mallory Schwarz Executive Director with Pro-Choice Missouri, and Nomachot Adiang, Organizer with Missouri Healthcare for All.

So let's just dive right into it.

When we're talking about Missouri's balloted initiative process, and its role in the democratic process overall.

I'm just curious, Nomachot, Mallory and McClain, you all have led various balloted initiatives in the past or been a part of balloted initiatives in the past.

Could you talk each of you about what it takes to make that process work and what it's like for you?

- My experience was very interesting, especially because it took a lot of pivoting since it was during the pandemic.

So that made it even more difficult, and made it even more difficult to get people out to vote.

What it took was definitely collective effort, I worked alongside organizations like Mallory's, worked very closely with Pro-Choice Missouri and other organizations to gather signatures throughout the state, as well as do like a coordinated get out to vote effort.

So yeah, it took, it was basically all hands on deck.

- So McClean, I'm curious from your perspective, Health Forward played a really important role in Missouri's Medicaid expansion, and in full disclaimer mode here.

BlaqOut, a nonprofit that I run outside of my work here at PBS was a grantee on the Medicaid Expansion Grant from Health Forward.

But I'm curious if you can talk about why it was important for a foundation, a healthcare foundation, like Health Forward to invest in this very, very robust political process.

- You really said the key word which is investment, which is how we viewed it at Health Forward, and really what's necessary to fund these campaigns because they are campaigns, and like any other campaign, they are very expensive.

And so it takes that collective effort, that collaboration, that Nomachot was talking about in order to not only put the necessary funding together, but also ensure that there's a necessary groundswell of organizations that are educating the populace on the ballot initiative, and what the language means in layman's terms, and how it will affect their lives to get people to really turn out and vote.

And so there had been an effort to enact Medicaid expansion legislatively years prior to the ballot initiative, but those had proved unsuccessful.

And so our foundation was willing to step in, and provide most of the funding for the campaign itself to ensure the dollars were in play to support the signature gathering initiative, to support the legal analysis that was necessary to support the campaign, to support the media buys that were necessary, because all that is what is required in order to have a successful ballot campaign in this day and age.

- Going through this process, I mean obviously, partnerships, bridge building is extremely important.

What are the conversations like that you have with a group when you're trying to get them on board for something like Medicaid expansion?

- For an organization that focuses on reproductive rights and abortion rights, people have asked, "Well, why were we involved in Medicaid expansion?

", and I think that kind of gets to this, 'cause to any different group, whether it's a labor group, or a healthcare org or an advocacy, or like what we're asking is the same thing, is, how do you see a ballot question, how will it impact your life, and the life of your constituents, and so we know from a reproductive rights and access standpoint, like having Medicaid expansion will allow more people to get access to reproductive healthcare like birth control.

Pro-Choice Missouri has been heavily invested over the past three years in several ballot initiatives, including Medicaid expansion, Raise Up Missouri, Clean Missouri, and for Medicaid, we had a team of seven people who collected 5,500 signatures to help get Medicaid expansion on the ballot, and that was a fraction of the total 120,000 signatures that were collected by the broader campaign.

And so no one group can do this alone, and it's not possible without the investment that was talking about of big groups, of national groups, who have more resources than groups like mine or Nomachot had when we are fighting on the ground for every bit of resource that we can get.

And so no one group can do this alone, and it takes all of us together.

- Peverill, could you explain how Missouri's rules around the ballot initiative process fair by comparison to other states?

There are 26 other states where they have a ballot initiative process where the citizenry can organize and put issues on the ballot for other voters across their states to consider these initiatives, how do we fare?

Are we somewhere in the middle?

Are we, you know, really difficult, really easy?

What are your thoughts?

- There are other states certainly that have greater expense and more signatures required, but they usually have a bigger infrastructure or industry built around the initiative process to assist organizations that are trying to get things on the ballot.

But by and large, we're not the worst, in terms of making it hard to get on the ballot, there are other states that are much more difficult, but we're certainly far from the easiest.

- Why even have this process?

Why is it even necessary?

- It's a process that we've had since the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.

It was actually a device that was brought over from Switzerland and the Swiss with Americans, the entities that use it the most in modern politics.

It's a way for voters to have an opportunity to bypass a legislature that is resistant to pursuing policies that enjoy broad support.

And so it took two efforts to get it in place here in Missouri, it was used a lot initially, then as with many other places around the country, it faded away until the 1970s, when it was discovered again by groups that again were fighting against entrenched interest in state legislatures, and they were able to use it to get things on the ballot, and put them into law with the support of voters in a way that states without this process aren't allowed to do.

- The populace is overwhelmingly supportive of Medicaid expansion, but for reasons that I think are uniquely felt within the legislature and the pressures that legislators face, decided against enacting it, although their constituents were supportive of it, and so this is just an additional lever beyond, you know, lobbying and direct advocacy of your legislators, or any other grassroots campaign.

And so it's just a way for everyday citizens to advance their interests, particularly when their representatives aren't carrying the line for them.

- Does this serve as a rebuke to politicians?

- I think, absolutely.

And I was smiling as McClain was talking, 'cause I think you're being generous to some of the disconnect between where Missourians are and where the folks in Jefferson City are.

So on abortion rights in particular, right?

We know that seven in 10 Missourians do not support interference in access to abortion, and yet year after year, and for decades, we have found our lawmakers in Jefferson City chip away and now end the right to this legal, essential healthcare through the legislative process.

We know that Missourians don't agree with this, and yet this is what we've seen.

And so in 2019, when HP 126, the abortion ban that just went into effect upon the fall of Roe first passed, we had an opportunity through this process through a ballot referendum to overturn that law.

Now at the time we were blocked by the Secretary of State from being able to do that, and what we viewed that as was a silencing of Missouri voices from being able to demand the healthcare that they need.

And I think we see that similarly with Medicaid expansion, where Medicaid expansion passed with a majority, Missourians told us what they want, and then it still took multiple cycles, multiple legislative sessions for Missouri lawmakers to do the work that needed to happen in order to implement expansion.

And so what we find is that many Missouri lawmakers are out of step with the actual wants and needs of Missourians, and so the initiative petition process is absolutely essential because we can't, family health and wellbeing, community health is tied to being able to effectively participate in our democracy, and if we take away people's opportunity to do that, such as limiting or further putting barriers around the initiative petition process, we are blocking their ability to participate in democracy.

We're blocking their ability to take care of themselves and their families.

- So that raises a really interesting thought for me, and I wanna throw this question to you, Nomachot.

Do you feel like when you go out and you're talking to people, 'cause you gotta get these signatures, and as the professor was saying in six outta eight congressional districts across the state, so there's sort of widespread geographic interest, if you will.

Do you find that people feel when you approach them for a signature that "I already voted" or " I'm not gonna vote and I don't wanna sign this petition "because they're not gonna listen anyway", or do they feel like "I wasn't heard maybe "at the ballot box, "and this is another opportunity to make that happen."

- So during my key expansion, one of the things that happened actually while we were gathering signatures is that it gave us an opportunity to collect stories, healthcare is one of those things that, you know, is a very, it's very universal issue, that it wasn't as difficult, but people who were opposed, what I usually said was, you know, "All this, all your signature does "is put something on the ballot, "and so you have several months after this point "to get educated and you can make your decision "and you can vote yes or no.

"This is basically just an opportunity for something "to get on the ballot for you to make that choice."

And I think that really appealed to voters, to be able to make that decision.

You have more power because your vote literally matters, 'cause every vote counts 'cause we have a 50% plus one threshold.

I think it also gives people the opportunity to see some form of hope, because unlike other things that, you know, the electoral college, people would otherwise feel very powerless, and with a lot of the signature gathering we've done, it's kind of empowered a lot of people, especially to be able to tell them that, "Oh, you know, "it was actually this process that raised minimum wage.

"It was a process that gave, you know, "access to healthcare", Clean Missouri was one of the highest votes we ever got for about initiative, it was over two thirds vote because people didn't want corruption in politics.

And so it was very easy for them to appeal to that, so ... - And it does sort of seem like there's this, I don't know, uniqueness to this process, that you as a citizen, personally, I feel like "I know my vote, actually my signature counts, "this is not gonna be one of those things "where I vote for somebody, "and they may or may not go one way or the other "on the issue", even if we've already had an understanding of what they said they were gonna do.

So this is very much, bam, it puts it there.

I'm curious though, Peverill, if you wouldn't mind talking to us about, you know, whether or not the ballot initiative, or the initiative petition process in Missouri is overused, because there are some people in our state who are making that case, and in fact, they are making efforts to amend or curtail that process altogether.

So where will that leave us?

- The talk that we've seen, not just here in Missouri, but in a number of other states about making it more difficult to use the initiative process is really driven by partisan preferences, and the idea of which side is winning and losing at this particular point in time.

Certainly if you go back 20 years ago, conservatives would've been aghast at the idea of making it more difficult to use the process, because at that point they were getting a lot of things through the initiative process that the legislature wasn't likely to give them.

And again, it's not something that's easy to do, and it's not something that you can pursue every item on your wishlist that you're gonna be able to do it, but on particularly high profile matters, where there does seem to be intense public interest, and public concern, and where there does seem to be a divergence between the legislature and majority opinion among voters, it is an outlet, it's a way of relieving pressure in the political system that has been used, found useful in the places that have it, and you can see a bigger disconnect in politics between voters and their elected officials in places that don't have it.

- Every month on our website we answer your questions about life in Kansas City, and the issues that you care about through our curiousKC initiative.

Let's hear from our community reporter, Cami Koons about our question of the month.

- This month's curiousKC question comes from Carl who asked "What recourse is there when the state assembly "nullifies the results of the ballot initiative?"

- But here in Missouri, they can and have in the past change things, you go back about 10 years, 12 years ago, there was a puppy mill measure that that passed, and the legislature immediately went and revised it.

So it can happen here.

There is some recourse, but not much for the voters, one recourse of course, is to hold that vote against elected officials the next time they're on the ballot, and the other is the referendum process, which is to take something the legislature has passed, and again, through a signature collection process, get enough signatures to put that particular measure on the ballot and allow the voters to decide whether they want to ratify what the legislature has done or overturned.

- We felt personally and saw in 2019, the secretary of state interfere with the referendum process.

And so we view all of these opportunities, initiative petition, a referendum, as the ways that Missourians can take their vote into their own hands, and demand what they need for the betterment and wellbeing and health of their communities, and then at almost every opportunity we see lawmakers who don't have their best interests in mind and at heart, intervene.

And so I think it's a frustration of mine to see the effort that it takes into this process, and then these counter efforts by lawmakers to block people from participation in their own democracy.

- Well, I think our viewers would be interested to know sort of what else is out there, so I'll go to the three of you, because you were sort of on the ground, you're organizing, you're investing in a number of issues that obviously seek to promote public benefit and general public good.

What do you know of that's also in the pipeline?

- The legalization of recreational marijuana is one that will come before Missouri voters this year, but I've also heard conversations around limiting the initiative petition process through initiative petition, which is, you know, interesting.

A more recent example that just passed was, and it's sort of the cousin to the ballot initiative process, the recent amendment to on the Kansas ballot in August around abortion access that was voted down.

- Well, I'm glad McClain mentioned the Kansas victory around protecting access to abortion and the right to abortion.

I think what was incredible is that Kansas is very similarly situated as Missouri, they're a deep red state like us, and yet abortion won with an 18-point-margin.

I don't know that we know right now that this is the path forward for Missouri, as you've heard in this conversation, this is a hugely expensive effort, it takes collaboration, not just across the state, but around the country, but right now we are exploring all options, because seeing that victory in Kansas, our inboxes were flooded with people ready to collect signatures, ready to get on the doors, because they see that we might not have another avenue in our state towards protecting access to abortion besides this process.

And so whether or not we get there, I think it is an option for Missouri when our lawmakers are taking all of our other rights, and options away.

- And that's where we wrap up today's conversation for this episode of Flatland.

That's been Peverill Squire, Political Science Professor at the University of Missouri, McClain Bryant Macklin, Director of Policy and Strategic Initiatives at the Health Forward Foundation, Mallory Schwarz, Executive Director with Pro-Choice Missouri, and Nomachot Adiang, organizer with Missouri Healthcare for All.

Be sure to check out flatlandshow.org for more coverage on this and other important issues impacting our region, and to submit your very own curiousKC question for next month's topic.

Also be sure to join us on Twitter space for our Flatland follow up conversation.

This has been Flatland, I'm D Rashaan Gilmore, and as always, thank you for the pleasure of your time.

Bye-bye.

(calm electronic music) - [Narrator] Flatland is brought to you in part through the generous support of AARP, the Health Forward Foundation, and RSM.

(calm electronic music)