The Missouri Constitution stipulates the number of signatures required for ballot access and where those signatures must come from:

Article III, Section 50. "Initiative petitions proposing amendments to the constitution shall be signed by eight percent of the legal voters in each of two-thirds of the congressional districts in the state, and petitions proposing laws shall be signed by five percent of such voters."

There are 9 congressional districts, so you must collect signatures in at least 6. The 6 we chose required 147,445 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. One must collect many more than that since signers who are not registered or are otherwise disqualified from signing won't be counted.

For the Article I amendment, we collected exactly 71,000 more signatures than the total required. For Article VI, we collected 63,502 more than the total required.

Again, a large excess is required since as many as 20% to 30% of the signatures won't count. In the case of the Article I petition, about 51,000 of the 71,000 "extra" signatures were not counted because they were considered "invalid".

That still left us with 20,000 more valid signatures than needed for the statewide total, but there was one more requirement. The constitution says you must have signatures equaling 8% of voters in each of the 6 districts. Excess in one district does not help you in another district in which you are short. Although we had lots of extra signatures in 5 of the 6 districts, in congressional district 2 we were short.

How could this happen?

Districts 1, 2 & 3 are the St. Louis metropolitan area. District 2 is comprised of residents from Lincoln County, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County. However, not all residents of St. Charles County are in congressional district 2 - many are in CD 9.

Likewise, many, in fact most, of the residents of St. Louis County are not in CD 2 - they are split between CD 1, CD 2 & CD 3. As a result, you don't really know which district a petition signer is from until his signature is validated, or checked, against the voter registration database.

That shouldn't be a problem, if all goes well. The petition management company we hired to track this sort of thing used a Michigan company to do 100% verification of the signatures we collected. They fell way behind in their verification, and so in the final weeks of the project the petition management company could only guess how many signatures we had in each of the St. Louis area districts.

Had we been able to move some of the signatures from CD 1 and CD 3 into CD 2, we would have had enough - at least as reported from the local election authorities.

Signature Recovery

The signature shortfall in CD 2 was not actually the 3190 figure reported by the local election authorities. There are always a certain number of signatures that are hard to read and were, therefore, overlooked when the government checked them. We hired petition forensic experts to pour over the rejected signatures and "glean" the remaining good ones. Additionally, we searched through most of the other 40,000 petition pages for misfiled sheets and even identified sheets for St. Louis County which had been mislabeled as St. Louis City petition pages.

All of that was a massive job and took hundreds hours - we left no stone unturned - but in the end we just couldn't find enough more valid signatures to meet the requirement. In the end, we were just hundreds of signatures short - not several thousand.

The Circulator Registration Problem

Another obstacle we faced was an issue over circulator registration forms. The Secretary of State claimed that many of the petition sheets were circulated by unregistered circulators. There were, in fact, a handful of circulators whose registration forms the petition management company could not account for. Most of those claimed missing by the SOS, however, we could clearly demonstrate had, indeed, been filed.

In some cases the SOS threw out whole petition sheets, labeling them "Circulator Not Registered" (CNR) but accepting other sheets from that same circulator because his or her registration form was, in fact, on file. Other times, the circulator had mailed in forms directly to the SOS, as the form instructs, but they were not counted.

In Cole County Circuit Court we contended that a voter who signed a petition should not be disenfranchised because someone else failed in the registration process. Although the lower court disagreed, we think we could have won that issue in the higher court. We did not pursue that question, however, because we could recover all but a few hundred of the CNR signatures without the appeal. That few hundred signatures was not enough to make the difference in success anyway.

Hurdles to Success

We could have made it - we should have made it - but there were a lot of things working against us. In retrospect, we clearly had enough time had there been fewer obstacles. A number of "challenges", in addition to the ones mentioned above, exasperated the problem posed by a limited time table. The elimination of one or two of the challenges would probably have resulted in success.

The weather alone surely cost us enough signatures to succeed. It was one of the wetter winters and springs in a long time and that was especially troublesome in the last couple of weeks, when we were concentrating on CD 2.

"Blockers" were also a problem. Many of the professional circulators were carrying a petition for a another group, independent of ours, the "Civil Rights Initiative". (Some pros won't work unless they can carry a few different petitions.) Opponents to the CRI petition sometimes slowed up the collection of eminent domain signatures as a result of their blocking.

Local authorities were also a problem at times. Sometimes they didn't understand our rights and would forbid petitioning in places it was clearly legal.

Just How Hard Is It To Get On The Ballot?

It's hard! And it should be. Amending the constitution is no trifling matter.

Of the many ballot initiative on the street this year, only five collected enough signatures to turn into the SOS, and we had two of them. The other three were only statute changes, so they didn't need to collect nearly as many signatures.

Since 2002, there have been 30 groups who have attempted to amend the constitution by initiative but only five made it to the ballot.

• Collective Bargaining (2002)
• Gambling on the White River (2004)
• Highway and Transportation Tax (2004)
• Tobacco Tax (2006)
• Stem Cell Research (2006)

Each of these issue had well-heeled proponents with financial stakes in the outcome. For a true grassroots effort like ours to get as close as we have is pretty good.

We Are The Wiser Now - We Will Prevail!

Someone once said, "There is no great loss without some small gain." In this case the gain was more than a small one. The MO-CPR team knows so much more about the process than we did even a year ago. We will be "armed for bear" next time and we will prevail!

It took 8 years - from 1775 to 1783 - to finally throw off the shackles of the king's tyranny. We can do no less than spend a couple of more years trying to preserve the liberty our forefathers secured for us.

The Next Step

The next election cycle is for the 2010 November election. Unless the governor calls a special election, we cannot take our amendments before the people any sooner. Now is the time to begin to prepare.

We need to build our coalition and we need to raise money. The volunteers were a very important part of the first attempt, but we will not succeed with volunteers alone. Encourage your friends and family to go to www.mo-cpr.org and give either by mail or online. Remember, money given to a candidate may or may not go toward issues you care about, but all of the money given to MO-CPR hits the target. (No one on the board has ever taken any compensation.)

We also need to continue to build our email list and list of volunteers. When we have another petition ready, we want the troops already mustered.

Thank you, again, to everyone who gave of their time or money!! It was not wasted - we will continue the war from higher ground this time!

- The MO-CPR Board

Details of Signature Collection, Below