Lawyers expect the Missouri Supreme Court to rule quickly on a challenge to the Raise Your Hand 4 Kids tobacco tax-increase proposal being on the Nov. 8 general election ballot.
The high court heard the case Thursday morning - with less than two weeks before military and absentee ballots must be ready to send to voters requesting them.
The Raise Your Hand group, or RYH4K, circulated petitions proposing to amend Missouri's Constitution, using ballot language approved by Secretary of State Jason Kander's office.
They collected nearly 300,000 signatures of registered voters, and Kander last month said enough of those signatures were valid to place the amendment on the November ballot.
If voters approve the proposal, the state's tobacco taxes would be raised, including an increase of 60 cents per-pack of cigarettes, phased-in over a several-year period.
The increased revenues would be used for early childhood education and some health care research.
The proposed amendment also includes a 67-cent-per-pack "equity" fee, which is to increase each year on some off-brand cigarettes.
But the annual increase wasn't included in Kander's original ballot language - and the state appeals court in Kansas City on July 8 added five words to the ballot title to make that yearly increase clear to voters.
And that change, Jefferson City attorney Chuck Hatfield told the Supreme Court, should result in the proposed amendment being removed from the ballot.
"A bedrock foundational issue," Hatfield said, "is what happens when there is a misleading ballot title, that is used to gather signatures to place a measure on the ballot?
"Are we going to count the signatures that are gathered with a ballot title that has been declared by the courts to be misleading?"
Hatfield said the Constitution is clear: signatures gathered with a "bad" ballot title don't get counted.
"The Constitution protects a process to put things on the ballot," he explained. "That process does not allow a majority of the people to come up with whatever they want then just stick it on the ballot."
But, St. Louis attorney Jane Dueker argued for the RYH4K group, they followed all the procedures correctly, using the ballot the language given by the secretary of state on each petition page and having a copy of the full amendment available for people to read it.
"I think we have a case here that is most challenging for the opponents but probably the simplest for this court," she argued. "The petitioners have a constitutional right" to propose changes to state laws and the Constitution.
"But opponents' rights are statutory," Dueker said, noting Hatfield and his clients want the court "to elevate the opponents' rights over the constitutional rights of the initiative proponents."
Dueker also argued the only ballot title that counts is the one certified to the election officials, to be placed on the actual ballots.
"When you're deciding to sign a petition, to get a vote, that's not your final decision," she later told reporters.
"The final decision is when it's on the ballot - and that's why the official ballot title can't be misleading."
Solicitor General Jim Layton agreed.
Eastern District Appeals Court Judge James Dowd, sitting in place of Judge Laura Denvir Stith, asked if Layton would make the same argument about a hypothetical but clearly misleading ballot title that promised "a constitutional right to a free puppy for every citizen in the state of Missouri," when the actual amendment proposed "puppy mills are now to be sanctioned and permitted in every ZIP code."
Layton said he would make the same argument, "because the question before the court is the sufficiency of the petition. The petition was done exactly the way the statute told these proponents to do it."