Judge hears arguments in tobacco tax case Friday

~ Secretary of State Robin Carnahan disqualified the measure last month.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Supporters of a ballot measure to raise tobacco taxes in Missouri tried to persuade a judge Friday to allow the proposal to appear on the November ballot.

Cole County Circuit Judge Tom Brown heard testimony and arguments, then set another hearing for Monday, when he's expected to rule.

Secretary of State Robin Carnahan disqualified the measure last month, finding the proposed amendment fell 274 signatures short of those required in the Kansas City area's 5th Congressional District.

Since that time, the Kansas City Board of Election Commissioners has reviewed some of the signatures it initially rejected, and found 314 that should be valid. Data entry clerk Tiffany Cline testified that she rechecked about 1,000 petition pages out of 2,900 overall.

Separately, both sides also presented handwriting experts who studied hundreds of signatures to determine if they were valid by comparing their petition signatures with those on their voter registration cards.

The ballot proposal would ask voters to raise the state's 17-cents-a-pack cigarette tax to 97 cents and increase taxes on other tobacco products to 30 percent of the manufacturer's invoice price, instead of the current 10 percent. Projected proceeds of at least $351 million annually would go toward health care and anti-tobacco programs.

The expert for the Committee for a Healthy Future, which is trying to reinstate the measure, found 1,070 of 1,339 signatures that the group thought should count were a match.

William Storer of Chesterfield said that he has studied petition signatures before, and that when people sign a petition, there will be changes from their typical handwriting. For example, they may be standing, at an awkward angle or writing more casually than normal.

"I find in petition signatures considerable variation from the petition signature and the voter registration card," Storer said. "That has to be taken into account."

The handwriting expert for the other side, Missourians Against Tax Abuse, also scanned full pages of petition signatures and identified problems. For example, Don Lock, of Jefferson City, said he determined that the person collecting signatures sometimes filled in information for the signers, such as their address and the date, and that in some cases it appeared the same person signed more than one line.

Opponents of the measure are also trying to get nearly 1,000 signatures that were verified by election authorities tossed out, citing problems such as the pages not being properly notarized or the petition gatherers not including all their required information, such as a full mailing address.

"The purpose of things like the notarization is to ensure there's not chaos," argued Marc Ellinger, an attorney for Missourians Against Tax Abuse.

Committee for a Healthy Future attorney Chuck Hatfield responded, "I just want to make sure that when a local election authority says 'yep, that's a valid signature,' that signature gets counted."

The attorneys generally grouped the questionable signatures into larger categories on which Brown could make decisions, simplifying the analysis and making it easier to tally if the judge agrees to allow more in.

For example, they agreed that 355 were valid except that they did not include a voter's congressional district as required.

Many of the signatures already deemed valid also lack that piece of information, and if the judge rules it's needed, tobacco supporters acknowledged they don't have enough to make the ballot on Nov. 7.

Another issue was whether signatures that varied slightly from those in their voter registration file, such as Tom Smith vs. Thomas Smith Jr., should count.

It's unclear just how those and other broad categories of signatures overlap with the ones verified later by the Kansas City election board.