The post Missouri Amendment 1: Cleaning up Missouri politics appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Sponsors of Missouri Amendment 1—aptly nicknamed Clean Missouri—aims to increase fairness, integrity and transparency in Missouri politics. With the length and complexity of the 2018 midterm ballot, it’s fortunate that this good-government proposal is first on the ballot, because many voters may fall victim to ballot fatigue long before they get to some of the other issues.
What’s in the Clean Missouri amendment? Here’s a plain-English summary published by the perpetually knowledgeable and helpful League of Women Voters of Metropolitan St. Louis.
Amendment 1 would do the following:
Those final two bullet points are crucial. They are the anti-gerrymandering provisions of Amendment 1. Contending that democracy depends on creating a level playing field in the way districts are drawn, Amendment 1 specifies that when districts are constructed they need to meet the following criteria, in order of priority:
The League of Women Voters has been advocating for the kind of redistricting reform specified in Amendment 1 [more details here] and, therefore, supports the proposal.
Here are some illustrations of a few, crazily gerrymandered Congressional districts in other states:
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