Across most of Missouri, the sheriff runs the jail. This amendment makes a sheriff nearly impossible to fire.

What does a sheriff do?

The sheriff is the county’s top elected police officer. In most Missouri counties, the sheriff also runs the county jail, where people are held before trial, often because they can’t afford bail.

How is a sheriff removed today?

If a sheriff breaks the law or abuses their power, the local county prosecutor can go to court to remove them from office. That is a local check, by an official your county elects.

What does Amendment 8 change?

Only the state attorney general, a politician in Jefferson City, could start that process. A sheriff who is a political ally of the attorney general could be nearly impossible to remove, no matter what happens in their jail.

What is a “constitutional sheriff”?

A far-right movement that claims the county sheriff is the highest authority in the land, above federal courts and federal law. This amendment grew out of that movement in Missouri’s Capitol.

What about “traitors”?

It copies a line from state law, that sheriffs must jail “all felons and traitors,” into the constitution. The law never defines who counts as a traitor. Once it’s in the constitution, fixing that takes another statewide vote.

Missouri already elects its sheriffs. This amendment is not about whether you get to vote for one. It is about who can hold a sheriff accountable once elected, and the answer it gives is: almost no one.

• It moves the sheriff’s duties from statute into the constitution, including a line requiring sheriffs to jail “all felons and traitors.” Missouri law never defines “traitor.”
• It takes county prosecutors out of the removal process. Only the attorney general could move to remove a sheriff. Today that is Catherine Hanaway.
• A prosecutor like Jackson County’s Melesa Johnson could not act on her own against a sheriff in her county.

The Missouri Independent traced this measure to a January 2023 meeting in the Capitol with MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. Afterward, Sen. Jill Carter filed a version that would have let sheriffs oversee all federal and state investigations in their counties. That idea comes from the “constitutional sheriff” movement, organized nationally by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, whose founder sat on the board of the Oath Keepers. The doctrine says the county sheriff is the highest law in the land, above federal authority. The federal-oversight language was stripped out. The movement’s goal, a sheriff answerable to no one, survived.

And in this country the county sheriff has a history of its own: the office that enforced slave patrols, Black Codes, and Jim Crow, and that stood at the courthouse door.

“Supports law enforcement” is the ballot’s description. A more accurate one: protects one office from oversight, and writes an undefined crime of treason into the document that governs every Missourian.

Vote no. Then learn your sheriff’s name, who runs your county jail, what it costs, and who has died in it. Accountability for the office does not wait for a ballot.

Back to the ballot