St. Louis Post-Dispatch oped:

The 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause mandates that state legislative districts have substantially equal populations. And today, every state uses total population as the baseline for drawing their legislative districts.

Supporters of Amendment 3 on the Nov. 3 Missouri ballot seek to change that. They claim Amendment 3 authorizes redistricting based on citizen voting-age population rather than total population. In other words, districts would be drawn to have an equal number of voters, without regard to children and foreigners. The practical effect in Missouri would be to exclude more than 50% of Hispanics and Asians but only 21% of whites and 28% of Blacks from the redistricting process. A recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that this would skew political power to whiter and more rural areas, particularly hurting the St. Louis suburbs and the Kansas City metro region.