JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missourians voted Tuesday to pass Amendment 3.
The amendment passed with 51% of the vote. There were 1,471,892 votes in support of the amendment and 1,413,223 against it, making a difference of 58,669 votes across Missouri.
The amendment is a GOP redistricting measure that repeals Clean Missouri, the new system for drawing state legislative maps that Missouri voters passed by 62% in 2018. The amendment also will change who is counted when drawing those maps.
Two state legislative maps are redrawn every census – one for the House and one for the Senate. Clean Missouri created a nonpartisan state demographer position that will draft those maps after the 2020 Census; Amendment 3 will undo that new redistricting system and replace it with bipartisan commissions appointed by the governor.
LIVE RESULTS: Election Day 2020 in Missouri, Illinois
The amendment earned the nickname "Dirty Missouri" by opponents who argued the ballot language was written to be deliberately misleading. The wording on sample ballots gave top billing to two minor changes to lobbying restrictions: it will ban lobbyist gifts — which were already capped at $5 — and reduce legislative campaign contribution limits by $100, a decrease from $2,500 to $2,400.
Additionally, the original ballot summary did not mention that the amendment would be a repeal of Clean Missouri. It was taken to an appeals court over the vague wording, where Cole County Judge Patricia Joyce described it as "misleading, unfair and insufficient."
The summary was revised to read that it would "change the redistricting process voters approved in 2018."
Missouri State Senator Bob Onder said he was somewhat surprised by the results.
"We were outspent 35 to 1. Very few campaigns survive being outspent 35 to 1," he said. "So really with respect to redistricting, we reestablished what has served Missouri well since the 1940s. Those district maps produced strong Democrat majorities for many years and now they are producing strong Republican majorities, that just reflects a political shift in the electorate."
The group that campaigned against the amendment, Clean Missouri Team, said in a statement that it will be "active and engaged in the 2021 redistricting process to ensure that voters and communities come first in new maps, not politicians.
"We are very disappointed that the politicians' lies and deception were effective enough to pass Amendment 3," the statement continued. "Thousands of volunteers from across the state and across the political spectrum have been working for years to pass and then defend fair redistricting rules in our constitution, and today we came up short."