Supporters of tobacco tax file lawsuit

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Supporters of a measure that would more than quadruple Missouri's cigarette tax filed a lawsuit Monday challenging a decision by Secretary of State Matt Blunt to keep the issue off the November ballot.

Citizens for a Healthy Missouri, which filed the lawsuit in Cole County Circuit Court, alleges Blunt's office provided outdated and mislabeled copies of the state's centralized voter registration database, which the group used to verify the signatures it collected.

"The secretary of state's office is the only official source of statewide voter registration information. They are required by statute to keep it accurate and up-to-date. Therefore, we rightly believed we were working with reliable information," said Brad Ketcher, a spokesman for the group. "It would be wrong to keep this proposal from the ballot because of their error."

Ketcher said it didn't appear anything intentional was done by Blunt to mislead the group, which describes itself as a broad-based coalition made up of health professionals, public health advocates, business organizations and others.

Spence Jackson, a spokesman for Blunt, said Monday the secretary of state had not seen the lawsuit but new information had surfaced in the case.

"They have given us new information to review and we are in the process of reviewing the information," said Jackson, who declined to say what the group had provided.

On Aug. 9, Blunt found group did not meet the constitutional requirement of gathering signatures equal to 5 percent of the votes cast in the 2000 gubernatorial election in six of the state's nine congressional districts.

Blunt said 2,399 signatures collected in the 2nd Congressional District in suburban St. Louis were invalid, leaving Citizens for a Healthy Missouri 673 signatures short of the 15,143 required in the district.

Signatures submitted

Citizens for a Healthy Missouri submitted about 130,000 signatures to the state in May. Of those, 96,242 were determined by local election authorities to be from registered voters -- well more than the 78,143 required by the state constitution.

The group has raised more than $2.2 million in support of the measure and spent more than $1 million trying to get it on the ballot.

The ballot proposal would have asked voters to add 55 cents to the state's current tax of 17 cents per pack of cigarettes. Taxes on other tobacco products would have risen by 20 percent.

Election officials in Lincoln, St. Charles and St. Louis counties submitted reports to Blunt outlining why signatures were rejected. Blunt has said he agreed with their reasons. The majority of signatures were rejected because they were collected from people who were not registered to vote.

The report to Blunt said 260 signatures were rejected in Lincoln County, 953 in St. Charles County and 977 in the portion of St. Louis County in the 2nd Congressional District.

The higher tobacco taxes would have generated an estimated $342.6 million annually for the state.

Under the proposal, 43 percent of the new state tax money would have gone to health care treatment, including prescription drugs for seniors and other initiatives for the poor, women, minorities and children.

Twenty-nine percent would have been allocated to hospital trauma care; 14 percent to life sciences research; 7 percent to smoking prevention efforts; and 7 percent to early childhood programs.

Last week, Blunt's office rejected a proposal seeking collective bargaining powers for fire and ambulance personnel partly because some petition signers apparently forged names.

Supporters of that measure said they were going to review the findings before deciding on whether to take the issue to court.