On Tuesday, August 4, Missouri voters did something you almost never see. They took two constitutional amendments put on the ballot by their own Republican supermajority and buried them.

Amendment 4 lost 80% to 20%. Amendment 5 lost 83% to 16%. Every single one of Missouri's eight congressional districts voted no on both.

That last detail is the joke. Amendment 4's whole purpose was to give any one of those eight districts a veto over what the rest of the state wants. It lost in all eight.

What Amendment 4 was actually for

Right now, if Missourians gather signatures and put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, it passes with a simple statewide majority. One person, one vote.

Amendment 4 would have changed that. A citizen-led amendment would have needed a majority statewide and a majority in each of the eight congressional districts. Win the state. Win seven of eight districts. Lose the eighth by one vote, and you lose.

Here's the part they didn't put on the yard signs: the new rule applied only to amendments citizens put on the ballot. Amendments the legislature sends to voters — including Amendment 4 itself — would still pass with a simple statewide majority. Politicians kept the easy rule. Citizens got the hard one.

The Missouri Independent reviewed certified election returns and found Amendment 4 would have blocked every citizen-led constitutional amendment Missouri voters have approved since 2020. Medicaid expansion in 2020. Recreational marijuana in 2022. Sports betting and abortion rights in 2024. All passed statewide. None carried all eight districts.

No other state in the country requires a ballot measure to win in every congressional district. Not one.

And Gov. Mike Kehoe didn't leave the timing to chance. He moved Amendment 4 off the November ballot and onto the August primary, when turnout is smaller and more Republican. Missourians turned out anyway and beat it four to one.

The eight districts were drawn by Republicans, for Republicans

This is where Missouri's congressmen come in.

The districts Amendment 4 would have handed veto power to are not neutral lines on a map. They were redrawn in a special legislative session in September 2025 — at the behest of President Donald Trump, who spent last year prodding Republican-run states to redraw their maps before the 2026 midterms. The same special session produced Amendment 4.

The map's target was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver's Kansas City–based 5th District, the seat held by the first Black mayor of Kansas City. The plan chopped it up, tied a piece of it to rural counties, and scattered the rest of Kansas City into neighboring districts. The Missouri House passed it 89–63.

Four of the five Republicans this site tracks in Missouri's U.S. House delegation lined up behind that redraw.

Bob Onder was the loudest. A state senator during the failed 2022 push for the same 7-1 map, Onder told St. Louis Public Radio in August 2025 that he wanted it done:

"We are a Republican state. Republicans have supermajorities in the Missouri House and the Missouri Senate. Republicans hold all of our statewide elected offices, including, of course, governor. And I believe that we should pass a congressional map that reflects the values of the state of Missouri."

Asked whether mid-decade redistricting might backfire, Onder said the math was easy: "we have seats that have wide enough margins that I think it's pretty straightforward math to draw seven very safe Republican seats."

He also got exactly what he asked for. The new map put all of St. Charles County into Onder's 3rd District — a long-standing goal for Republicans there.

Ann Wagner, Jason Smith and Eric Burlison joined Onder in supporting the redraw. Wagner's 2nd District picked up part of Jefferson County plus all of Washington, Gasconade and Crawford counties.

Mark Alford was the outlier, and only barely. He told St. Louis Public Radio he was neutral on whether to redraw the map — while conceding his own district would likely become more competitive as a result. The map handed him a chunk of Kansas City.

So: Missouri Republicans drew themselves a map at a president's request, then asked voters to make that same map the gatekeeper for every future citizen initiative. Missourians said no by 60 points.

Then they blocked the vote on the map itself

Missourians never got to vote on the gerrymander. Not because they didn't try.

A group called People Not Politicians turned in more than 300,000 signatures in December to force a referendum on the new map. Local election authorities spent hundreds of hours checking whether the signers were registered voters.

On Tuesday afternoon — a few hours before the polls closed, on the last legal day he had to decide — Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins declared the whole petition unconstitutional. He refused to tell reporters whether it had enough valid signatures.

"Whether they had one signature or 500 million signatures doesn't really matter because they are unconstitutional," Hoskins said.

He rejected a second citizen petition the same day, one that would have limited the legislature's power to rewrite measures voters had already passed.

Missouri House Democratic Leader Ashley Aune called Hoskins a partisan rather than an election official, saying he "has engaged in obstruction and dishonesty to stop Missourians from exercising their constitutional right" to vote on the gerrymander.

People Not Politicians sued that night. And there's a live question hanging over Tuesday's results: in a May ruling, Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ginger Gooch noted that if the referendum power does apply to redistricting, the 2025 map would never have taken effect at all — meaning Tuesday's primary was run in district lines that were never legal.

Amendment 5: a tax cut for the top, paid for by everyone else

Amendment 5 was the other half of the ask. It would have phased out Missouri's individual income tax and handed the legislature the power to raise and expand sales taxes to replace it.

The income tax is about 64 percent of Missouri's general fund — the money that pays for schools, roads, health care and public safety. Neither the legislature nor the governor explained how they'd replace it. Voters were asked to approve the swap first and find out later.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy ran the numbers on who wins and who pays:

• The top 1 percent would get an average tax cut of almost $40,000.
• Middle-class Missourians making roughly $50,000 to $80,000 would pay about $535 more per year.
• Seniors would take a net tax increase of about $335 million, averaging $365 more each — because Social Security benefits, active-duty military pay and military pensions are already exempt from Missouri income tax. Cut a tax they don't pay, raise one they do, and they just lose. For a middle-income senior earning between $49,100 and $79,700, ITEP put the hit at $1,600 a year.

Amendment 5's backers had the money. Missouri Promise PAC — funded entirely by groups that do not disclose their donors — outspent the opposition by more than 2-to-1 overall and nearly 4-to-1 on broadcast ads, and doubled its ad spending in many markets in the final week. It lost 83-16.

Kehoe's response to being outvoted five to one was to promise he'd keep going. "I believe our work is far from over," he posted after the results came in.

Missouri keeps voting. Republicans keep overriding.

None of this is new in Missouri. It's the pattern.

Voters expanded Medicaid in 2020. Voters passed Amendment 3 in 2024 to put abortion rights in the state constitution — and Republicans moved immediately to override them, with the Missouri Supreme Court reinstating the ban in May 2025. Voters approved a minimum wage increase and paid sick leave in 2024, and lawmakers repealed the sick leave part.

Amendment 4 was the logical endpoint of that pattern: stop losing the arguments by making it nearly impossible for voters to have them.

Meanwhile, the same delegation that backed the map has been busy in Washington. An estimated 160,000 more Missourians are projected to be uninsured by 2034 under Trump's budget bill — the Medicaid coverage Missourians voted themselves in 2020, now being taken back by the people they sent to Congress. Jason Smith, who chairs the House's tax-writing committee, used that same bill to bury a doubled prison sentence for leaking billionaires' tax returns on page 1,081. Eric Burlison, told by hundreds of his own constituents that they opposed a local data center, wrote a letter supporting it anyway.

The through-line is simple. When Missourians get a direct say, they use it — and Republicans keep trying to take the say away. Amendment 4 was that attempt written into the constitution. It's the same instinct driving the manufactured "voter fraud" panic nationally: if you can't win the vote, change who gets to count.

On Tuesday, Missourians got one clean shot at it and hit 80-20. The referendum on the gerrymander itself is now in court, where the people who drew the map would very much like it to stay.

Source

• Rudi Keller, Missouri voters reject income tax phaseout, initiative petition changes, Missouri Independent, Aug. 4, 2026. Photo: Gov. Mike Kehoe votes in Jefferson City (Rudi Keller/Missouri Independent).