Lawsuit claims Secretary of State’s Office did not count valid signatures for Lake casino question

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KMIZ)

Supporters of an Osage River gambling boat say Missouri's Secretary of State illegally deprived voters of their rights to put the issue on the November ballot.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, Osage River Gaming and Convention asks a judge to order that the proposal be put on the ballot. The Secretary of State's Office announced earlier this month that the petition did not have enough signatures.

According to the lawsuit, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft found the petition was short 2,031 signatures from legal voters in the state's Second Congressional District, the area south and east of St. Louis.

However, Osage River Gaming and Convention said the office and local election authorities didn't count valid signatures of legal voters when verifying the petition.

The group submitted its initiative petition to the Secretary of State's Office on May 5. After a petition has been turned in, the office takes inventory of every petition page by county, according to the Secretary of State's website.

The office can choose to verify every signature on the petition or use random sampling to determine if the petition has enough signatures to make it to the ballot.

The petition pages are then copied and sent to the counties' local election authorities to verify each signature on the petition. Once those are returned to the Secretary of State's Office, the office then tallies the valid signatures.

In this case, petitions were sent to each county's local election authority to verify every individual signature.

Osage River Gaming and Convention said in its lawsuit that it believes the Secretary of State's Office or local election authorities verifying signatures failed to count legal signatures due to reasons including:

• Determining a signature was of someone not registered to vote when in fact that person is registered to vote
• Determining the voter listed the wrong name when in fact it was the correct name
• Determining the voter listed a wrong address when the address was actually correct
• Determining a signature was not written in a form similar to how the voter's signature has appeared elsewhere.

The lawsuit states, "These determinations were wrong."

Including these signatures would allow the petition to have more than the necessary 36,099 signatures from the Second Congressional District, according to the lawsuit, thus allowing the motion to be put on the ballot.

In a press release, the group said, "Verifying every signature on multiple initative petitions this summer has been a very long process for election officials and we realize mistakes happen. However, ORGC has always been confident their initiative petition contained a sufficient number of valid signatures from legal voters to qualify for placement on the Nov. 5, 2024, general election ballot and are now asking the Court to do so."

The Secretary of State's Office was not immediately available for comment.

Among the initiative petitions that have made the ballot are one to legalize abortion and another that would raise the minimum wage and require employers to provide paid leave.

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