Teacher tenure, sham early voting measures go down to defeat

Missouri defeated two wrong-headed constitutional amendments in the mid-term election Nov. 4, sending both to the legislative trash bin where they belonged.

TEACHER TENURE

Amendment 3, a proposal that would have taken control of teacher evaluations away form local school districts and school boards and instead based employment decisions on students’ standardized test scores, was overwhelmingly rejected.

Rachel Neckermann, a teacher in the Fort Zumwalt School District, who appeared in a commercial denouncing the measure, called Amendment 3’s resounding defeat a “win for students and teachers.”

“(Voters) made it clear that they believe that teachers, parents, principals, superintendents and school boards know their school districts better than bureaucrats in Jefferson City,” Neckermann said in a news release.

Those same well-educated voters turned down a phony early voting measure that would have done nothing to make voting easier in Missouri, but would have made it harder to pass true early voting in the future.

SHAM EARLY VOTING

Amendment 6 would have allowed six days of early voting – maybe.

The amendment was referred to the ballot by the Republican-led Legislature as a distraction to confuse voters and prevent them from voting for a separate citizen initiative to create a six-week early voting period. The citizens’ initiative ultimately failed to get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, but Amendment 6 had already been approved for the ballot by the legislature.

In addition to creating a far more restrictive early voting period, contingent upon funding by the Legislature, Amendment 6 also would have limited early voting to only regular business hours at the office of the local election authority. It would have excluded Saturdays and Sundays, and would have ended on the Wednesday prior to the election.

The amendment also included provisions that would have limited changes to early voting in the future, making it far more difficult to get true early voting in Missouri.

Voters defeated the measure by a wide margin.