Five Questions on One Ballot: Missouri, November 3, 2026

On November 3, Missourians will answer five statewide questions. Four are constitutional amendments referred by the legislature; one is a referendum the people forced onto the ballot themselves. Two of them are about the machinery of voting rather than about any policy a vote would produce, and that is the quiet feature of this ballot. Before the state decides who governs, it is being asked to decide how much of the deciding the people get to keep.

I have written before that the republic is worth defending not because it is healthy but because it is correctable.¹ These five questions, taken together, are a test of whether the correction stays available. What follows is each question in plain language, the change it actually makes, and where I come out on it. The order is the order the ballot lists them.

Amendment 3: the repeal of the 2024 reproductive-rights amendment

The official title asks whether the constitution should be amended to repeal the 2024 amendment on reproductive healthcare, allow abortion in cases of rape and incest under twelve weeks’ gestation, medical emergencies, and fetal anomalies, authorize the legislature to regulate abortion, require parental consent for minors, and prohibit gender-transition procedures for minors.² The fair ballot language names the target precisely: a “yes” vote repeals Article I, Section 36, the amendment voters approved two years ago, which had protected reproductive freedom through fetal viability.²

Two things deserve to be said plainly. First, this is not a new policy proposal. It is an erasure of a decision the voters already made, at an election to which nearly three million Missourians came out to make it. The 2024 amendment passed with 51.6 percent of the vote, 1,538,659 to 1,443,022.³ The legislature’s answer to a vote it did not like was not to persuade voters to change their minds but to ask them to vote the right way the second time, on a day with a different turnout.

Second, the amendment bundles two very different things under one yes-or-no. The abortion restrictions and the ban on gender-transition procedures for minors arrive as a single question, so a voter who wants one and not the other has no way to say so. The bundling is the strategy, not the accident.

Where I come out. The 2024 amendment should stand. I do not think a majority may reach into the constitution to strip a right the previous majority wrote there, least of all when the right is one I have treated, in the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, as too basic to be voted away in the first place.⁴ The ban on care for transgender minors I would reject even standing alone; the trans teenagers I have written about are not an abstraction to me, and a state that writes indifference to their suffering into its founding document has made a choice about who belongs. A “no” vote keeps the 2024 amendment. That is where I land.

Amendment 6: the initiative and referendum power

Amendment 6 was placed on the ballot by citizen petition, and it is the only question this November that a group of voters put there without the legislature’s help. It would declare the powers of initiative and referendum fundamental rights, subject any law restricting them to strict judicial scrutiny, let courts revise misleading ballot summaries, prohibit the legislature from weakening the initiative process, and require that changing a voter-approved initiative take a vote of at least 80 percent of both chambers of the legislature, followed by approval of the voters.⁵

The 80 percent threshold is the provision that draws fire, and it is worth understanding what it does and does not do. It does not change the threshold to pass an initiative; a simple majority still carries the day.⁵ It changes the threshold for the legislature to undo what the people passed. That asymmetry was deliberate, and it responds to a decade of practice. In 2008 the Missouri legislature passed a law exempting certain energy companies from a renewable-energy initiative before the voters had even approved it, an end run the state supreme court struck down seven years later when it held that the legislature could not “preclude the people by initiative from adopting a law in conflict with the statute.”⁵ The amendment is an attempt to write that holding into the text, where a future legislature cannot ignore it.

Where I come out. I have spent more words defending Missouri’s referendum power than most writers spend on any subject. When a secretary of state sat on a petition for eight months to run out the clock on the people’s veto, I wrote that the fix was to take the clock out of the officer’s hands and make the suspension automatic the day the signatures land.¹ This amendment does not go that far. It protects the power from the legislature rather than from the administrator. It is a partial fix, and a fix of the right problem. Missourians have used the initiative and the referendum for more than a century; they deserve a constitution that stops the other side from undoing their work the moment they look away. That is where my vote goes.

Amendment 7: the “Show-Me Prosperity Fund”

Amendment 7 would create a permanent public endowment, the “Show-Me Prosperity Fund,” to support state government and eventually to replace state-imposed taxes when its investment earnings grow large enough. It caps annual appropriations from the fund at 3 percent of its average market value over the prior five years and prohibits the legislature from diverting the principal.⁶

It is the most attractive-sounding measure on the ballot and the emptiest. The state has no money to put into the fund. The text does not identify a funding source, an initial deposit, or a path to the scale at which the fund could earn enough to replace a state budget. Missouri’s net general revenue is about $13 billion a year.⁷ To replace even a quarter of that at a 3 percent draw would take a fund of more than $100 billion, about twice the state’s entire annual all-funds budget. No state has built one, and none of the states that talk about it have funded one.

There is a deeper problem with the idea, and it is one I have written about at the federal level. I spent a long essay arguing that the United States needs a hard fiscal rule, and that the Swiss debt brake works because it constrains spending at the scale of the actual problem.⁸ Amendment 7 is the opposite instinct. It does not discipline the budget; it promises that a magic fund will one day make taxes unnecessary. The revenue in the state treasury comes from the people who pay it, and the honest conversation about state finance is about what to fund, how fairly to raise the money, and how to keep the books balanced. A permanent endowment with no capital is a promise to skip the conversation, written in the constitution so that the promise cannot be broken. When a state is asked to amend its founding document to do arithmetic that does not work, the answer is no.

Amendment 8: the elected county sheriff

Amendment 8 would place into the constitution the requirement that counties elect a sheriff every four years, along with the duties the office already has, and provide that an elected sheriff may be removed only through a writ of quo warranto initiated by the attorney general.⁹ Every one of those provisions is currently a statute. The measure adds nothing a county cannot already do by law, and it subtracts a lever: today a sheriff who breaks the public trust can be removed in more ways than one, and after this amendment the removal path narrows.

Where I come out. A constitution is not a statute book, and the surest way to devalue the state’s founding document is to keep stuffing ordinary policy into it. The sheriff should be elected, and is; the sheriff should be removed when he should be removed, and the amendment makes that harder. This is the amendment I find easiest to reject, and the reason is the least dramatic: it is not needed.

Proposition A: the congressional map

Proposition A is the referendum on House Bill 1, the congressional map the legislature drew in 2025. The question reads: “Do the people of the state of Missouri approve the act of the General Assembly entitled ‘House Bill No. 1 (2025 Second Extraordinary Session),’ which repeals Missouri’s existing congressional plan, and replaces it with new congressional boundaries that keep more counties intact?”² A “yes” vote upholds the new map; a “no” vote leaves the 2022 districts in place.

I have covered the map fight at length, and I will not re-argue it here.¹ The essentials: the 2025 map was drawn to flip the Kansas City district and give Republicans seven of Missouri’s eight seats; the referendum petition against it was filed two days before the law would have taken effect; the secretary of state held the certification for eight months and rejected it on primary day; and the state supreme court ruled unanimously in September that the map “is not the law and has never been the law,” ordering the 2022 districts back into force for this election.¹⁰ The measure takes effect 30 days after the election if voters approve it, so this vote cannot change the 2026 congressional races; it decides the map for 2028 and beyond.¹¹

That timing has confused voters into thinking the vote is worthless. It is the opposite. This is the once-in-generations chance to reject a gerrymander directly, at the ballot, exactly the way the state’s constitution always intended. A gerrymander is easier to defeat at referendum than at the polls that produced it, because a referendum pools the whole state’s judgment instead of letting a dozen safe districts ratify their own lines.

Where I come out. Reject the map. A “no” vote leaves in place the districts that were in force before the legislature reached for an advantage, and it tells the next session that the people are watching the map they draw. That is not a subtle point. It is the reason the referendum power exists.

The shape of the choice

Read the five together and a pattern appears. Three of them, Amendments 3, 7, and 8, are legislative attempts to fix in the constitution what the legislature wants written there before a future session can revisit it: a restriction on reproductive freedom, a promise about taxes, a placement of a statute into higher law. One of them, Amendment 6, is the people’s attempt to stop exactly that habit. And one, Proposition A, is the people exercising the veto that Amendment 6 exists to protect.

I do not expect everyone to vote my way, and I would not want a ballot where everyone did. What I do want is for each voter to read the actual question and not the thirty-second version of it, to know which “yes” takes a right away and which one restores one, and to understand that the machinery questions on this ballot are not abstract. They decide whether the next round of decisions is the people’s to make.

Think clearly. Live intentionally. Love deeply.

Notes

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