Voting YES approves the new map. Voting NO throws it out.

Every ten years, after the census, states redraw the lines that decide which neighborhoods vote together to elect a member of Congress. In 2025, after President Trump urged Republican-led states to redraw their maps, Missouri’s legislature redrew them early, to gerrymander the state. A gerrymander is when politicians draw those lines on purpose so their party wins more seats than its voters earned.

The new map cuts Kansas City in half at Troost Avenue, the street that has separated Black and white Kansas City since the days of redlining, and attaches the Black east side to rural counties stretching almost to Jefferson City. Those voters would be outnumbered in their own district. Black Kansas City would lose the one seat in Congress where its vote decides the winner, and the map is built to hand Republicans seven of Missouri’s eight seats.

Voting NO keeps the districts Missouri has used since 2022, which keep Kansas City’s core, on both sides of Troost, in one district. Whichever map wins decides who represents you in Congress for the rest of this decade.

In 2024, Missouri voters passed Amendment 3, which made decisions about pregnancy, abortion, and birth control a right protected by the state constitution, the state’s highest law. Politicians can’t undo a constitutional right with an ordinary bill, so the legislature put a new amendment on your ballot to erase it.

This one bans almost all abortions again, allowing them only in a medical emergency, for serious problems with the pregnancy, or for rape or incest in the first twelve weeks. It also bans gender-affirming care, like puberty blockers and hormones, for anyone under 18, even when the young person, their parents, and their doctors all agree. They bundled the two together so a campaign about one could carry the other.

You already won this vote in 2024. They put it back on the ballot betting you won’t come out to defend it. If it passes, winning the right back would take another statewide petition, millions of dollars, and years, while Black women in Missouri already die from pregnancy-related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women.

In Missouri, regular people can write a law, collect signatures, and put it on the ballot for everyone to vote on. That’s called a citizen initiative, and it’s how Missourians won Medicaid expansion, a higher minimum wage, legal marijuana, paid sick leave, and abortion rights, all things the legislature refused to pass on its own.

The problem: the legislature keeps undoing what voters pass. Voters approved paid sick leave in 2024, and lawmakers repealed it months after it took effect. Amendment 6 makes that much harder. To change or repeal a law the people passed, 80 percent of both the House and the Senate would have to agree, and then it would go back to you for a vote. It also protects your right to petition and lets courts fix misleading ballot descriptions.

Vote YES so the next thing you win at the ballot box stays won. It came from a citizen petition, not from the politicians, and the state Republican Party is fighting it.

This one is sold as a gift: someday, no more state taxes. The catch: it creates a state savings account, invested in the stock market, and promises to cancel state taxes once the investments earn enough to pay for everything the state does.

But it doesn’t put any money in. Any public money in the fund would come out of the same budget that pays for schools, healthcare, and roads. The Missouri Budget Project estimates the account would need more than $600 billion to replace the taxes it covers. The state’s entire general budget is about $13 billion a year. And because it goes in the constitution, no future legislature could stop it.

Your kids would pay for it in crowded classrooms and closed clinics. Their kids might never see the tax cut. In August you rejected Amendment 5, a different plan to get rid of the income tax, 83 to 17. This is the same idea, slower.

The sheriff is the county’s top elected police officer, and in most Missouri counties also runs the jail. Today, if a sheriff breaks the law or abuses people in custody, the local prosecutor can go to court to remove them. Amendment 8 takes that power away from local prosecutors and gives it only to the state attorney general, a politician in Jefferson City.

That means a sheriff who is a political ally of the attorney general could be nearly impossible to remove. It also copies a line from state law requiring sheriffs to jail “traitors” into the constitution. The law never defines who counts. The push for it traces back to a far-right movement that claims a county sheriff is the highest authority in the land, above even federal courts.

Wherever a sheriff abuses power, Black people are usually the first to feel it. This makes that sheriff harder to hold accountable, for a generation.