After Amendment 6

Decline to Panic: What Ten Years of Initiative Petitions Tell Us

Amendment 6 passed. We opposed it, and we still think it was a mistake. But the alarm posts now flooding conservative social media get the facts wrong, blame the wrong people, and offer no plan. Here is what the record shows, and what we should do next.

Act for Missouri · November 12, 2026

The posts you are seeing

Within days of the November 3 election, posts began circulating with a list of ten initiative petitions already filed for the 2028 ballot: ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, a state health care cooperative, a state renewable energy project, and more. The message attached to these lists is some version of this: Amendment 6 has opened the floodgates, Missouri is about to become a socialist state, and the people who voted against Amendment 4 in August are to blame.

Some of those posts go further and blame Act for Missouri, along with other conservative groups and individuals, by name, as though we had helped pass Amendment 6. We did not. We opposed Amendment 6, and so did the others named with us.

What we have in common is something else. We also opposed Amendment 4 in August, and we are willing to say so when the party gets it wrong. That is what we are being blamed for. The charge is not that we supported Amendment 6. The charge is that we did not fall in line.

We said at the time that Amendments 4 and 6 were mirror images of each other: one tilted the process toward the legislature, the other tilts it toward whoever can fund a petition drive. Our position has not changed.

What we will not do is join the panic. A list of filed petitions is not a list of future laws, and the data from the last ten years proves it.

A stack of filed petitions is nothing new

Filing an initiative petition in Missouri costs nothing. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins said so himself last year while describing how his office had been flooded with filings. Because it is free, people file early, file often, and file many versions of the same idea.

That is roughly 1,160 petitions in six cycles. Ten petitions filed a week after an election is an ordinary week. In November 2016, at least 39 were filed within two weeks of that election, and by the time Jay Ashcroft was sworn in as Secretary of State roughly 120 were waiting for him.

Most of that volume comes from a handful of people. In the 2018 cycle, the Secretary of State's office reported that just 32 individuals filed all 371 petitions it counted, and one person filed 60. Last year, Secretary Hoskins said a single sponsor had submitted more than 75 nearly identical petitions for 2026.

Look again at the 2028 list. Electronic signatures for petitions and proxy voting in the legislature were both filed for 2026. Neither reached the ballot. Electronic signatures and several ranked-choice voting proposals were filed for 2024 too. None reached the ballot. These are repeat filings of ideas that have already failed to gather signatures, more than once.

Filing is the easy part

A filed petition is a piece of paper. Here is what stands between that paper and the ballot.

1. Write it and file a sample sheet. Anyone can submit a proposed petition to the Secretary of State. There is no filing fee. This is the only step the ten petitions on that list have completed.
2. Pass the form review. The Secretary of State sends the petition to the Attorney General, and both review whether it meets the legal requirements for form. Many are rejected here. By mid-2017, 91 of the first 239 petitions filed for 2018 had been rejected and 29 withdrawn.
3. Get a fiscal note. The State Auditor has 20 days to estimate what the proposal would cost or save state and local governments, and the Attorney General reviews that summary.
4. Get an official ballot title. The Secretary of State writes the summary voters will see, and certifies the title. Opponents and supporters can and do sue over the wording, which can stall a campaign for months.
5. Gather the signatures. A constitutional amendment needs signatures equal to 8% of the last vote for governor in each of six of Missouri's eight congressional districts. For 2026 that meant at least 170,215 valid signatures. A change to state law needs 5%, or 106,384. Campaigns collect far more than the minimum because many signatures are thrown out.
6. Meet the deadline. Signatures are due six months before the general election. Miss it and you wait two years.
7. Survive verification. Local election authorities check signatures against the voter rolls. A petition that clears the bar in only five districts fails.
8. Survive the courtroom. Certified petitions are routinely challenged in court. This year Amendment 6 itself was rejected by the Secretary of State and reached the ballot only after the Missouri Supreme Court ordered it.
9. Win the election. Then you need a majority of voters statewide.

Steps five through nine take money and organization. The 2018 minimum wage campaign paid a petition company about $687,000 just to collect signatures for a statute. The 2022 marijuana campaign reported spending nearly $6 million to get on the ballot. This year, a well-publicized campaign for a public education amendment gave up with about 35,000 signatures, one fifth of what it needed.

How many actually make it

Fewer than two in every hundred filed petitions reach the ballot. Fewer than one in a hundred becomes law. Anyone telling you a list of ten filings is a list of ten coming laws is either uninformed or counting on you to be.

The legislature's own record

Citizens are not the only ones who propose amendments. Legislators do it through joint resolutions, labeled HJR in the House and SJR in the Senate. A joint resolution that passes both chambers goes straight to the ballot. It needs no signatures and no governor's signature.

Legislators file these by the hundreds too. In the General Assembly that just ended (2025 and 2026), House joint resolutions were numbered up to at least HJR 174 and Senate joint resolutions to at least SJR 66. That is at least 240 proposals. Six reached the 2026 ballot. Voters approved two.

In 2026 the legislature sent six measures to voters and lost four of them, including Amendment 4 by 80 to 20 and Amendment 5 by 83 to 17. That is the context for everything that follows.

The fight nobody showed up for

For years, Republican officeholders and party leaders have explained their losses at the ballot box the same way. On the night Amendment 4 failed, Governor Kehoe blamed the outside interest groups who like to change our constitution, pointing to 2020, 2022 and 2024. Missouri Right to Life's PAC argued the petition system lets out-of-state billionaires and corporations go around the legislature. Secretary Hoskins has said the same in official press releases.

There is truth in it. Large out-of-state donors did fund several of these campaigns. But the claim leaves out the other half of the ledger. Look at what was raised to oppose the measures Republican leaders complain about most.

Across eight measures and eight years, the organized opposition raised about $2.9 million in total. Supporters raised about $79.9 million. That is roughly 27 to 1.

The details are worse than the totals:

• 2018 Proposition B and 2024 Proposition A. No committee reported raising a dollar against either one.
• 2022 Amendment 3. Governor Parson called it a disaster. A committee was formed to oppose it, run by a veteran Republican strategist. Press coverage in the final weeks found it had reported no contributions at all.
• 2024 Amendment 3. The measure Republican leaders call the worst of the lot was outraised about 16 to 1.
• 2026 Amendment 6. The petition drive began in 2025 and signatures were filed in May. In late September, with five weeks to go, a state senator announced he would form a committee to oppose it. It raised about $110,000 against more than $8 million.
• 2026 Proposition A. Republicans spent about $3.1 million trying to keep the map referendum off the ballot. Once it qualified, no committee campaigned to defend the map.

They can raise the money when they want to

The usual answer is that Missouri conservatives simply cannot match that kind of funding. Amendment 5 says otherwise.

When party leaders wanted to phase out the income tax, the committee behind Amendment 5, Missouri Promise PAC, reported $21.1 million in total receipts for the election cycle in its post-election filing with the Missouri Ethics Commission. That is more than seven times what was raised against all eight initiatives above combined. Opponents of Amendment 5 raised about $5 million.

Amendment 5 lost 83 to 17.

Two lessons come out of that result, and both cut against the party's story.

First, the money exists. The donors who found $21 million for a tax plan found almost nothing to stop Medicaid expansion, marijuana, a minimum wage increase, or the 2024 abortion amendment. That is a choice about priorities. It is worth noticing, too, that the Amendment 5 money came through a nonprofit incorporated in Delaware that does not disclose its donors, from the same leaders who complain about outside money in Missouri elections.

Second, money alone does not win. A four-to-one fundraising advantage bought 17% of the vote. The reverse case exists too. In 2020, the legislature's Amendment 3, which reversed the redistricting changes in Clean Missouri, raised about $309,000 against $7.6 million in opposition, and it passed.

And when the party's own initiative petition reform was on the ballot in August, the campaign for Amendment 4 raised about $1.3 million against $11.5 million. Its main committee had reported $132,100 less than two weeks before the vote. If leaders believed the petition process was the gravest threat to Missouri's Constitution, they did not fund the fight like they believed it.

Campaigns are won with clear messages, a ballot question voters can trust, volunteers who knock on doors, and enough money to be heard. On measure after measure, Missouri's Republican leadership, its donors and its allied organizations supplied none of the four. Then they blamed the voters, and tried to change the rules.

What the alarm posts are for

So what should you make of a post that lists ten petitions and tells you Missouri is finished?

Ask what it wants you to do. "Decline to sign" is good advice as far as it goes; nobody should sign a petition they have not read. But it is advice for one of nine steps. Ask whether the post tells you who is organizing against the measures that might actually qualify, what the plan is, and what happened the last eight times. If the only next step on offer is to be afraid, to share, or to donate, the post is serving its author more than it is serving you.

Defeatism is its own kind of surrender. So is telling the people who voted against Amendment 4, a majority in every congressional district in the state, that they ruined Missouri. Those voters are the people we need to persuade. Insulting them is how you lose the next one as well.

The same goes for turning on fellow conservatives who opposed both amendments. A movement that treats disagreement with party leadership as the cause of its defeats will never look at the real cause, which is on the ledger above.

What Amendment 6 changed, and what we do now

Amendment 6 did not change how hard it is to get a petition on the ballot. The signature requirements and the simple-majority vote are the same as before. What changed is what happens afterward.

We opposed this because it locks in whatever passes, flaws included, and because it protects one path to amending the Constitution while leaving the legislature's path untouched. We still believe Missouri's Constitution is too easy to change, and that any fix has to apply to every path, whether a measure comes from citizens or from the Capitol.

But we also believe citizens must keep a way to act when the legislature will not. That belief is why we opposed Amendment 4. And it points to the only honest conclusion available after November 3.

The old strategy was to let initiatives pass unopposed and then ask the legislature to undo them. That strategy is finished. It produced the backlash that passed Amendment 6, and Amendment 6 now forbids it.

What remains is the process itself, and it is open to everyone. Here is what we think that requires.

1. Fight at the ballot, early. Opposition to a bad measure has to start when signatures are being gathered, with a real committee, real funding and a message tested on real voters. Starting five weeks before the election is not a campaign.
2. Learn to run petitions. If a measure passed by initiative is now nearly permanent, then the things conservatives care most about belong on that path too. Equal protection for the unborn is one. A constitutional amendment process that sets one higher standard for every route is another, and after Amendment 6 a citizen petition may be the only way left to achieve it.
3. Build the volunteer base first. About 170,000 valid signatures across six congressional districts is a logistics problem. The side that has trained volunteers in every district will keep winning it.
4. Write measures voters can trust. Amendments 4 and 5 lost in every congressional district. We believe a large part of the reason is that voters did not trust what they were being asked. Plain proposals that do one thing earn that trust.

None of this is easy. All of it is more useful than a post telling you to be afraid.

The bottom line

Over ten years, about 1,160 petitions were filed in Missouri. Sixteen initiatives reached the ballot. Eleven passed. On the ones Republican leaders now cite as proof the system is broken, their side was outraised about 27 to 1, and in several cases never organized at all.

The process did not beat Missouri conservatives. Absence did. That can be fixed, but only by people willing to do the work instead of mourning the result.

Sources

• Ballotpedia, Contributions to Missouri ballot measure campaigns (all campaign finance figures, compiled from Missouri Ethics Commission reports)
• Ballotpedia, Missouri 2026 ballot measures (2026 results; petitions filed and certified, 2010 to 2024)
• Missouri Press Association (2026 cycle filing count)
• Missouri Secretary of State, press release on initiative petition reform (2026 filings; one sponsor with more than 75 petitions)
• Missouri Secretary of State, "Make Your Voice Heard: Missouri's Initiative Petition Process" (process steps)
• Revised Statutes of Missouri, Chapter 116 (sections 116.175 and 116.332)
• Ballotpedia, Signature requirements for ballot measures in Missouri
• The Missouri Times (32 filers behind 371 petitions in 2018) and The Missouri Times (rejections and withdrawals, 2018 cycle)
• St. Louis Public Radio (39 petitions filed within two weeks of the 2016 election)
• Missouri Independent, August 4, 2026 (Governor Kehoe's remarks; Amendment 4 and 5 funding)
• Missouri Ethics Commission, Missouri Promise PAC (C264249), amended 30 Day After Primary Election report filed September 14, 2026, Report Summary line 8 (total receipts this cycle, $21,135,681.27)
• KCUR, June 25, 2026 (Amendment 5 funding source)
• Sullivan Independent News (Amendment 4 support committee fundraising through July 23, 2026)
• KCUR, September 29, 2026 (late opposition to Amendment 6)
• Missouri Independent via KRCG, October 2026 (Proposition A spending)
• Missouri Independent, October 27, 2022 (2022 Amendment 3 opposition committee)
• Missouri Independent, March 31, 2026 (education amendment signature drive)
• St. Louis Public Radio, October 30, 2026 (what Amendment 6 does)