Op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Don’t eat the ballot candy. Missouri’s Amendment 7 would limit your vote.”

This op-ed by Show Me Integrity Chief Executive Officer Benjamin D. Singer appeared in the September 18, 2024 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

This November, Missouri voters will consider Amendment 7. It’s a misleading measure that the Legislature placed onto the ballot to attack local control and limit voters’ freedom in elections. Unfortunately, it’s part of a pattern.

In 2020, Missouri’s legislature successfully tricked voters into gutting the redistricting reforms in Clean Missouri, an anti-corruption ballot measure that voters had approved just two years earlier. When voters saw Clean Missouri on their 2018 ballot, the language led honestly with changing the redistricting process, and voters passed it with a whopping 62% of the vote.

So why did Missourians vote to repeal a massively popular measure they had just passed? Because, instead of being upfront with voters and leading with the fact that this subsequent measure would reverse Clean Missouri, the Legislature wrote a deceptive first line on the ballot about banning gifts from lobbyists to legislators. The lie worked; the Legislature’s 2020 trick measure passed with 51% of the vote.

This tactic is called “ballot candy”: Politicians lead a measure with a popular statement to dupe voters, hiding what the measure is really about.

On Nov. 5, you’ll see something very similar on your ballot. The Missouri Legislature is, once again, using ballot candy to trick voters into voting for something buried deep in the confusing language of a ballot measure.

This time, you’ll see a proposal that begins with a first line about making it illegal for non-citizens to vote. That’s been the case all across America for the last century. But because many people agree with that idea, they won’t read the fine print and will just vote “yes” without reading further.

A few lines down in Amendment 7 sits the heart of the bill — eliminating your right to decide the type of elections you want in your city or county.

The measure will ban any election that isn’t the traditional partisan, plurality, “pick-one” voting system. Most governments use this outdated voting system because politicians like it that way. It makes it harder for voters to hold them accountable. But across the country, citizens across the political spectrum are pushing for more representative ways to vote.

One of the simplest examples is called “Pick-All-You-Like” voting or “approval voting.” When voters go to the polls, they can choose all the candidates they support, rather than being forced to settle on one option. The candidate with the most total votes wins.

This is how we all make decisions in our daily lives. When you want to decide what pizza toppings to order for dinner with family, you might say you’d be fine with pepperoni, sausage, or pineapple, not just one. Selecting all options you are content with helps people to cooperate, rather than just getting a pizza with pineapple because a small minority of 37% selected it, while 63% were split between pepperoni and sausage.

Unlike traditional single-choice systems that encourage polarization, approval voting lets politicians engage with more diverse groups of people. When you can choose all the candidates you approve of, more votes go to popular, unifying, broadly accountable leaders.

Take, for instance, the 2023 aldermanic race in St. Louis’ 9th Ward, where Michael Browning ran against two incumbents, each with opposite approaches to neighborhood development. Browning advocated for a more unifying, middle-ground development agenda, successfully appealing to a majority of voters. Under a traditional voting system, Browning’s candidacy might have been overshadowed by the incumbents and their strong but narrower bases of support. Approval voting allowed voters to support multiple candidates, empowering Browning to bridge ideological gaps and find a middle ground between the two more divided positions.

But Amendment 7 doesn’t allow Missouri citizens to make that choice. By obscuring its true implications under the guise of a problem that doesn’t exist, the measure undermines the will of Missouri voters.

If you want ranked-choice voting, approval voting, open primaries in the future, Amendment 7 takes away your choice. And if Missouri voters support ranked-choice voting as a whole, Amendment 7 won’t reflect that. In fact, it’s designed to get voters on the record in the fine print.

If you want to hold politicians accountable with better elections, then when you go to vote, remember that this “trick measure,” Amendment 7, is an attempt to take your freedom away.

Singer is Chief Executive Officer of Show Me Integrity, Missouri’s nationally award-winning political reform organization. The board of the organization includes Republicans, Democrats and independents advocating for more effective, ethical government. Learn more at showmeintegrity.org.

Subscribers can read the op-ed in its original format at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.