Judge Rules in Favor of Secretary of State, Missouri Sports Betting Initiative

• Judge Daniel Green has ruled in favor of Secretary of State John “Jay” Ashcroft to allow a sports betting initiative question to appear on election ballot
• Green ruled plaintiffs failed in all four counts of the lawsuit
• Missouri voters will determine fate of state sports betting during Nov. 5 general election

A Missouri judge has ruled that a sports betting initiative did indeed receive enough valid signatures to appear before voters on the state’s Nov. 5 general election ballot.

Circuit Court of Cole County Judge Daniel Green today ruled in favor of Secretary of State John “Jay” Ashcroft and Winning for Missouri Education’s efforts to place a constitutional amendment question to legalize Missouri sports betting on the upcoming general election ballot.

Green ruled the plaintiffs failed on all four counts of their lawsuit.

Too Steep a Hill to Climb for Plaintiffs

A spokesperson for the Winning for Missouri Education campaign praised Green’s ruling in a released statement.

“Today’s ruling, while expected, is nevertheless a big victory for Missourians, who overwhelmingly want to join the 38 other states that allow sports betting, so that we can provide tens of millions in permanent, dedicated funding each year to our public schools. For too many years, Missourians have watched as fans cross state lines to place sport bets, which deprives our Missouri public schools of much needed funding. A vote for Amendment 2 in November will bring those dollars back to Missouri classrooms,” the spokesperson said.

Green noted in his judgement just how steep a hill the plaintiffs had to climb, revealing that lawsuits seeking to remove certified initiative petitions from the ballot “are highly disfavored.”

Neither party identified any case in the history of Missouri where a plaintiff succeeded in removing an initiative from the ballot through a certification challenge, Green reported.

The lawsuit, which was filed on Aug. 21 by plaintiffs Jacqueline Wood and Blake Lawrence, claimed the Winning for Missouri Education campaign came up short for valid signatures in Missouri’s first and fifth Congressional districts and Ashcroft’s determination of sufficiency was incorrect.

Plaintiffs yesterday argued that the first Congressional district was now the only one in flux. Counsel told the courtroom during the hearing that Ashcroft improperly calculated the number of necessary valid signatures for the first district, claiming he should have used the most recently established Congressional district boundaries.

However, Green wrote that the new Congressional district boundaries have yet to be used in a gubernatorial election, so Ashcroft was right to not use them in his calculations.

“The Secretary used the Congressional Districts that were in effect at the time of the most recent vote for Governor, which is what those sections call for,” he wrote in his judgement.

According to the Secretary of State’s Office, the campaign needed 25,632 signatures and submitted 55,864 signatures in the first Congressional district. The report revealed that 25,714 signatures were valid, surpassing the necessary threshold by just 82 signatures.

Plaintiffs also argued that Ashcroft should have started with the total statewide number of votes in the last gubernatorial election, determined 8% of that number, and then simply divided evenly by eight and required the same number of valid signatures in each Congressional district.

Defense claimed during the hearing that this methodology has never been used to calculate necessary valid signature totals in the history of Missouri ballot initiatives, and Green agreed in his ruling.

“…it is clear that the proper threshold is 8% of the vote for Governor in each of six of Missouri’s eight congressional districts. That is exactly what the Secretary did (and has done for decades) and the court finds no fault in this method,” he wrote.

Failed in All Four Counts

Green ruled the plaintiffs did not prove any of the four counts they posited in their lawsuit.

The  plaintiffs alleged that Ashcroft improperly calculated the number of signatures because he failed “to take the total number of people who voted for governor in 2020, multiply that number by eight percent, and then divide that number equally among Missouri’s eight Congressional Districts.”

The remaining three claims were as follows:

• Ashcroft’s method of calculating the number of necessary signatures was incorrect because it failed to use the vote in the current boundaries of the First Congressional District as established in
  Section 128.461, RSMo, and that as a result, the petition did not have enough valid signatures in the First Congressional District.
• The plaintiff’s believe that Ashcroft incorrectly certified a sufficient number of signatures that were submitted from the First and Fifth Congressional Districts. The plaintiffs claim that a “significant number of the signatures determined to have been valid” in the two Congressional Districts were not legal signatures.
• Wood claims her rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were deprived in that “the method employed impermissibly and knowingly decreased the weight of a third Congressional District voter’s signature when compared to the weight of a First Congressional District voters signature.

Green said the burden is on the plaintiffs to prove that at least 83 of the counted signatures in District One were actually invalid. Because all of the signatures for the district were on notarized pages, the court “must presume they were valid.”

“Plaintiffs’ evidence is insufficient to establish that signatures are ‘actually invalid,’ because it does not prove anyone was not ‘legally entitled to vote on the measure’ at ‘the time it was presented to him’ or her,. The Court has determined that the Secretary’s method of determining the number of signatures needed in each Congressional District was valid and lawful,” Green wrote.