Missourians! You Need to Know About

There is an extremely important vote coming up in Missouri soon and we all need to know about it.

In the past few decades, gerrymandering masterminds have been working on new ways to sort voters into districts so their preferred politicians can't be held accountable. Sometimes they try to change who counts in maps — and sometimes they try to rig the math to skew maps and take away voters' voices.

But a bipartisan coalition of reformers, academics, and leaders has been fighting back to find new ways to identify and quantify bias in maps and pass new reforms that put voters and communities first. (Some politicians really, really hate these reformers, but we'll get to that).

Here are 3 things you need to know about what’s in Amendment 3:

1. Amendment 3 would flip the voter-approved rules on their head to explicitly allow partisan gerrymandering.

In the Missouri constitution now, clear rules ensure no party will have an unfair advantage in legislative district maps. Essentially, the constitution requires future map-drawers to do the best they can to limit partisan bias in maps.

Instead of limiting gerrymandering, Amendment 3 would give the political operatives and lobbyists tasked with drawing maps the permission to gerrymander Missouri maps in extreme ways that would silence voters of both parties. It's insidious, it's gross, it's un-American — but it's right there in the fine print.

2. Amendment 3 would explicitly allow our state legislative maps to be more gerrymandered and more extreme than any other state legislative plan.

At the nonpartisan research website, Planscore.org, statisticians have analyzed state legislative plans from across the country — and literally no other statehouse plan is as gerrymandered as Amendment 3 would allow.

3. Amendment 3 would explicitly allow our statehouse maps to be gerrymandered more than any other state legislative plan in 40 years — since Mississippi in 1979.

It gets worse. The math in the fine print of Amendment would allow state legislative maps to be:

• More gerrymandered than any other statehouse plan in America.
• More gerrymandered than any other statehouse plan in 40 years.
• More gerrymandered than any other statehouse plan since 1979. In Mississippi.

It's on us to stop this insanity from going into our state constitution. The politicians behind Amendment 3 are going to want to talk about anything besides the real goal of their proposal, which is to rig maps so incumbents can't be held accountable by their constituents.

If you haven't yet, make sure you sign up to volunteer virtually with the No On 3 team. Together, we're going to stop the politicians trying to dupe voters — and we're going to defeat Amendment 3. Sign up to volunteer today.

Links:

Vote NO on Politicians' Dirty Missouri Amendment

#3on3: The worst gerrymander in America

Washington Missourian: Dirty Missouri is an “odious” measure

Joplin Globe: “Listen to Jack Danforth and vote ‘no'”

NAACP Kansas City Chapter President: Dirty Missouri “outrageous even by Jeff City standards”

Say “no” to Amendment 3, Jeff City’s corrupt gerrymandering scheme