April General Municipal Election

From May to July 2022, the Board of Elections (BOE) processed a total of 164,470 signatures from two petitions to adopt ranked choice voting and to legalize marijuana.

In Missouri, the initiative petition process occurs in even numbered years. The petition process and certification of petitions for the ballot is overseen by the secretary of state (SOS). If certified, petition pages are sent to election authorities to verify that the signatures are those of registered Missouri voters in the correct congressional district. After the election authority verifies the signatures, the SOS determines if they meet the minimum number to place the issue on the ballot for the general election.

In about two months, 40 BOE staff used a statewide portal to successfully verify 81,511 signatures, just under half of the total signatures received. To verify petitions, each name and signature on the petition was compared to the same components in Missouri’s centralized voter registration (MCVR) database. The remaining 82,959 signatures were rejected for either not being a registered Missouri voter or a non-matching signature. The petition to legalize marijuana met the criteria to be placed on the November 8, 2022 ballot, having enough verified signatures to account for 5% of legal voters in 6 of the 8 congressional districts.