Missouri judge finds GOP redistricting measure misleading

https://news.yahoo.com/missouri-judge-finds-gop-redistricting-180530554.html

DAVID A. LIEB
,Associated Press•August 17, 2020

A Missouri judge on Monday rewrote the summary for a legislative redistricting measure that will appear on the November ballot, ruling that the state's Republican-led Legislature tried to misleadingly entice voters into repealing an anti-gerrymandering reform that voters approved just two years ago.

The decision by Cole County Circuit Judge Pat Joyce struck down the Legislature's ballot summary for Amendment 3 as insufficient, unfair and partly false. She replaced it with a ballot summary suggested by a group that sponsored the successful 2018 measure and is opposed to this year's revision.

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The Republican-led Legislature this year referred a new amendment to the November ballot that would abolish the nonpartisan demographer position — returning the task to a pair of bipartisan commissions — and relegate “partisan fairness" and “competitiveness” to the bottom of the criteria.

Like the 2018 measure, the Legislature's revision combines the redistricting changes with popular measures to lower campaign contribution limits and restrict lobbyist gifts to lawmakers.

The ballot summary written by the Legislature said a “yes” vote would “ban all lobbyist gifts," reduce contribution limits and create citizen-led commissions to draw districts based on several criteria.

Joyce ruled that the summary wrongly failed to tell voters that Amendment 3 “would eliminate the legislative redistricting rules Missourians overwhelmingly adopted just two years ago to combat political gerrymandering and replace them with a redistricting process similar in substance to the one they just voted to abandon.”

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