The Missouri Supreme Court is weighing whether to uphold the November passage of a measure that raised the state’s minimum wage and mandated paid sick leave for some employees.
Voters approved Proposition A by 15 percentage points and more than 445,000 votes. It increases the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 with some exceptions. It also requires most businesses to offer an hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours an employee works, though there are caps on how much sick leave someone can use.
A group of business associations and voters sued, arguing there were several problems with the language that voters saw on the ballot. The court heard arguments Wednesday in the election challenge case and will issue a ruling at a later date.
“We are not here on policy. That’s not the issue,” said Marc Ellinger, an attorney for the challengers. “We’re in front of the court because this measure, Proposition A, violates the Constitution, and its ballot title is misleading.”
The challengers want the Supreme Court to declare Proposition A invalid, or order a new election with different ballot language.
Jobs with Justice Ballot Fund, the group that fought to get the measure on the ballot, asked the court to allow the results to stand.
“The court’s duty is to uphold this law if at all possible,” said the fund’s attorney, Loretta Haggard. “The contestants ask this court to overturn the will of the voters who exercised their fundamental right of the initiative based on technical issues that could have been, but were not, raised before the election.”
In a statement, Jobs with Justice called the election challenge a “wasteful distraction from implementing the will of the voters.”
“This attempt to overturn the election is a slap in the face to Missourians,” said Fran Marion, a workers advocate based in Kansas City. “Proposition A is the law of the land because voters spoke decisively last November. Full stop.”
The arguments
Every initiative petition contains a ballot title that includes a summary of what the measure is about and a summary of its fiscal impact. Challengers said both of those elements were flawed.
The summary of Proposition A, Ellinger wrote, did not accurately convey to voters what the measure would do. And the fiscal note summary did not contain all of the expenses to local governments and private businesses that the auditor, Scott Fitzpatrick, included in the underlying fiscal note.
The state high court, challengers said, has ruled that any information the auditor includes in the fiscal note “without qualification, limitation or rebuttal” must be mentioned in the fiscal note summary.
Opponents of Proposition A also focused on a section of the Missouri Constitution that requires initiative petitions to have a single subject and a clear title. While supporters of the measure and the secretary of state, who wrote the summary, argued that all parts of the proposition dealt with minimum employee compensation, “ironically, you can’t find employee compensation in the measure,” Ellinger said.
Attorneys for Fitzpatrick and the secretary of state’s office defended their wording. But even if the language was incorrect, they said, opponents were missing an important element of an election challenge – proof that people would have voted differently were the missing information included.
“As you can see from the record, contestants have offered no such evidence or otherwise met their burden of showing any irregularity is of sufficient character to cast doubt on the result of the election,” said Robert Tillman, deputy counsel for the state auditor.
Any irregularity casts doubt on the result of the election, Ellinger said, and it’s up to the court to determine whether it would be enough to overturn the results.
